Reign of Conformity
by Baeraad
Summary: LAST CHAPTER IN PLACE! Here's the final showdown between the newly Awakened mage Simon Stromberg and the Virtual Adept who believes him to be a deadly threat.
1. Dreaming's end

_DISCLAIMER: The World of Darkness, including the Technocracy, the Virtual Adepts, and the laws of true magick in general is the property of White Wolf. All characters of this story are mine, but the setting is borrowed._

_This is my first attempt at a Mage story. More chapters are to follow._

I'm not sure how it started. I suppose a wise man would say that nothing _ever starts, come to that. A wise man would say that things just carry on, that there has been no true beginning since Genesis or the Big Bang or whichever theory you happen to patronise. But I'm not a wise man. I'm a foolish man – or at any rate a man who has been acting like a fool for most of his thirty-three years. I want answers – and in this case, I have none._

I'm fairly sure when I _noticed that it had started, though. There was a time and a place where I, for the first time, noted that I wasn't the person I thought I was, the person I had always been up to then. Until I learn how to be wise, that will have to suffice. So; it started __there and it started __then._

Strangely, it didn't start with any of the things in my life that had been terrible or miraculous right from the start, though I only noticed it after things had gotten stranger. It didn't start with Patrick Farson, this shadowy 'father' of mine. It didn't start with Diana Helsing, with Greystone Entertainment, or with Karl Militts and his misguided schemes.

It started my home computer switching on without my help and starting to threaten me.

I had just gotten home from the office, a bit later than I really liked. For some reason, it's always been against my principles to bring my work home with me. My home is my castle, and a castle free of bookkeeping and reports if I have any saying in the matter. With my job, that means I spend most of my time at the office, making sure everything is done before I go home. But never mind that. At least when I'm at home, I'm at peace.

I live in a three-room apartment in the middle of the city. I suppose I could afford something larger, or something in a quieter neighbourhood. But I'm not all that interested in where I live. The place gives me somewhere to sleep and to read, and pretty much everything else I do elsewhere anyway.

I do have a computer, though. I'm not sure why. I'm not one of those guys who swear curses and damnation over the 'infernal machines' at every opportunity – in fact I find them fascinating – but I have plenty of opportunity to handle them at work. Still, I keep one around out of general principle. And it's good for an occasional game of chess.

The computer is standing on a table in my living room, clearly visible from the door, and when I got inside this night, I saw the screen glow green in the darkness. I frowned. I must have left it on after using it the last time. Sloppy. It's not good to keep electric devices running for too long. It could have started a fire.

As I locked the door, turned on the light and walked over to it, I realised that I hadn't even _touched the thing for days. Could it have been on for that long, without me realising it? Granted, I had been busy – it was the time of year when we had to get the department's annual report in order, which required a lot of supervision on my part – but it still seemed strange._

The next possibility was a bit scarier. Could someone have broken in, in whichever way? I had no idea why a burglar would switch on the PC (looking for codes, maybe? or perhaps someone thought that I had corporate secrets hidden in it?) but it was the only thing I could think of. And then he might still be there.

Now, I'm a big guy. I've got some sort of weird metabolistic effect going for me that keeps my muscles strong even though I never lift weights or anything like that. But that's not the same thing as being a brawler. I feel sick at the sight of blood. I didn't even get into fights in kindergarten. Even a thief armed with nothing but fists and desperation could probably take me. And one that had a knife, or worse, a gun…

I stood still, even holding my breath. I listened. I did not consider my hearing good enough to hear heartbeats or anything like that, but even so, you usually _know when a place has people in it, don't you? I do, at least._

Nothing. My every sense told me that I was alone in my apartment.

I turned the rest of the lights on and quickly walked through each room, checking for things that had gone missing. My TV was still in place, as was my radio. The paintings still hung on the walls. I had some old and valuable volumes in what I somewhat pretentiously styled my "library," and they were still there, too.

My breaking-and-entering theory seemed to be falling to pieces by the second. I shook my head and went back into the living room again, shutting off the computer. Maybe it had just started itself for no particular reason? Like a sort of electronic burp? There was a reason for everything, but not necessarily a _simple reason._

I took my clothes off and hung them neatly over the chair in the bedroom. Then I put on the shorts I sleep in, and went to brush my teeth.

When I walked through the living room, the computer was on again, flashing me the green Windows screen. I wrinkled my brown. Hadn't I…? Yes, I most certainly had!

All right, not an electronic burp, then. A malfunction. I would have to call someone about this tomorrow. For now, though, I'd just have to get a bit more extreme. I turned off the computer again, then knelt beside the table and pulled the plug out of the wall. There.

I went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and came back to see the screen lit and active once more.

I scratched my head. What was this? How could a computer, or _any machine, be running once you had cut off its power source? This whole situation was ridiculous. Still, I felt a spark of interest starting to mix with the annoyance. Perhaps it was because I had spent the whole day going through budgets and calculations and reports. I had wallowed in boredom; a mystery was, in a way, exactly what I wanted right now._

On the other hand, it was two in the morning, and if I was lucky I might get three our four hours of sleep until my alarm clock went off and told me to get back to the treadmill. I wanted a mystery, but I wanted to sleep even more.

Still – I couldn't just leave it running. It went against my whole upbringing. You kept things orderly, my parents had taught me. You kept things orderly, and you put things back when you were done with them. And that included keeping computers switched off when you weren't using them.

Regardless of the computer's opinion in the matter.

I checked the contact. It was still unplugged. The computer seemed to run on ghost-energy. I contemplated getting a screwdriver, opening the plastic shell up and searching for a battery in here. It was the only explanation I could think of for how this might be happening. But why anyone would want to install a battery in a PC was beyond me. It wasn't as if you could move it around easily, now was it?

Driven more by curiosity than anything else, I sat down and opened a few files. Everything seemed normal. I started a game of Bombs and blew myself up, and it was all as it always was. Except for the fact that I was sitting in front of a disconnected computer.

I wondered if I had gone insane. Maybe I was just _imagining the computer being on; maybe I was sitting in front of a dark screen, moving the mouse around and clicking at nothing. As answers went, that one was as sensible as I could think of._

Still… shouldn't madness be a bit more, well, interesting? Either more traumatic or more liberating? What sort of inner conflict could possibly be resolved by imagining a computer that wouldn't switch off? If this was my subconscious harassing me, I really couldn't have much imagination…

Besides, I didn't _feel insane. The situation was crazy, but I wasn't. As far as I could tell, I was the same as I always had been._

Well, there was a simple way to test it. I was fairly sure that I had, in fact, unplugged the computer. I could see the unconnected wire lying on the floor from where I was sitting. I reached out with a naked foot and touched it. It felt real enough. So if I was imagining something, it would be far easier to imagine a picture on the screen. And if I was in fact only seeing the computer as switched on in my own diseased mind…

… there was _no way that I could send someone an email, was there? I grinned to myself, pleased with my reasoning. I'd send Diana, my secretary, a letter about something trivial. Remind her that I wanted a list on manuscripts currently considered for publishing on my desk by noon tomorrow, say. And then, when I found it there after lunch (which I would in any case; Diana never really needed to be reminded of anything), I'd make a casual remark like "So you got my mail?"_

If she then said "What mail?" I'd know I was in trouble. And if she didn't…

If she didn't, something very strange was going on.

I clicked on the mailbox icon. Instead of the program starting, though, I suddenly got a message in red printed across the screen.

_We see you, Farson._

Peculiar. Aside from everything else, my name is Stromberg, not Farson. I felt a bit shaky – things were getting a bit creepy – but to my surprise, I also felt… exhilarated. I might be facing a stalker who had broken into my apartment and made some serious adaptations to my computer – and that was just the explanation that occurred to me immediately; I didn't doubt that there were others, and worse ones – but at least I wasn't bored anymore.

I did know a Patrick Farson, namely my godfather. Though why someone would think the best way to reach him was here was beyond me. I saw Patrick maybe every six months or so, and our little meetings never lasted longer than an hour, at most.

The writing on the screen faded away. A new line replaced it.

_Reality is subjective, Farson._

"Most profound," I mumbled dryly. I was still a bit scared, and I was still a bit excited, but now I was also starting to feel a hint of contempt. I got the impression that whoever was behind this watched far too many bad movies. He wanted to freak me out. Well, maybe he was succeeding, just a little, but I'd be damned if I was going to panic because some idiot who couldn't even get my name right was trying to spook me.

I wrote "Who are you?" on the keyboard, just to see what would happen. In response, the screen showed a new line.

_I am who I am._

I winced and wrote: "That is from the Bible. I seriously doubt that you are God."

_I am the God in the Machine, Farson._

There it was again. I wrote: "My name is Simon Stromberg. I am not Farson."

There was a brief pause. I wondered, faintly amused, if the program had not been instructed for how to react if the user claimed to have another identity. I had more or less decided that this had to be some kind of conversation program. Those existed, I had gotten the impression of; they were capable of interacting with a user, answering questions and storing received information, but they weren't really AI:s, and they could only react within their parameters.

If so, this was outside of them; the program ignored my claims to Stromberghood.

_We will meet soon, Farson, it wrote. Then the computer shut down, all the lights going off and the screen going blank._

I plugged the contact back in and started it up again, but no matter how much I looked, I couldn't find any trace of a new program on the hard drive. And when I switched it off, it stayed switched off, though I waited an hour for it to get back on by itself again.

I suppose I should have gone to the police the next day, but I didn't. First of all, the story was just too crazy for me to tell it to anyone just yet. I was fairly certain that I could keep them from throwing me into a room with soft walls; I'm a junior executive, and I have strings to pull, if I feel the need for that. But at the same time, if word got out that I received melodramatic threats during chat sessions on a switched-off computer, people would get nervous. The President of Greystone Entertainment might decide that he didn't want a nutcase in a high position. I might not get fired – my record was very nearly flawless – but I would certainly be under a significantly more thorough watch, and the next slip _would cost me my job._

And second, well…

Thing is, this was _my mystery. I didn't want a bunch of detectives running all over it. I wanted to see what would happen, though I had a feeling I might come to regret that curiosity. But really, so what? There were precious few that would miss me, if the worst came to be. My parents, possibly, but they'd get over it._

I wouldn't have felt this way a year ago, I mused as I stood in the elevator on the way up to my office. Oh, I might have been curious, but I would still have wanted someone else to take care of it for me. Why this new itching for doing things myself? Something that came with age, possibly? Maybe that feeling of _Can't__ someone else do it? had just been a lingering trace of juvenile sloth. Still, that theory didn't feel all that likely. Maybe I should see a shrink or something to have it explained to me…_

No. I didn't have time to go on some sort of sight-seeing tour through my own mind. That thought felt proper and mature, but it also left a kind of lingering sadness in me. I tried to ignore it and stepped out of the elevator, into a hallway, and then into a corridor.

"Good morning, Mr. Stromberg," one of my co-workers said politely as he passed me, carrying a bundle of papers.

"Good morning, Nicholas," I said absently. I felt a trace of guilt over not adding something more to that. I should have asked him about some aspect of his life that was on his mind at the moment. Not that I cared all that much, but it increased the morale in a team if the director showed an interest. But I was tired, and I had a lot on my mind. Next time, I promised myself. When I wasn't so distracted.

I walked through my secretary's office to get to mine. She was already there – I was a few minutes later than usual, which I also blamed on my wilful computer – and I nodded to her where she sat behind her desk.

"Good morning, Diana."

"Morning, Simon." Diana was one of the few people here who had actually taken me up on my offer to use my first name. That pleased me somewhat. It was also good for morale if I didn't seem like a distant and imposing figure, like a vengeful god of a mountaintop. I was part of the team, that was all. "You're looking tired. Did some lucky girl get to keep you up all night?" She grinned shamelessly.

Secretaries shouldn't be allowed to be like Diana, I had sometimes thought. It enforced popular prejudice. She is the kind of person who, no matter how she dresses, always makes everyone who sees her very aware that she's naked under the clothes, if you know what I mean. She's got long, black hair, big dark eyes, skin in a lovely nut-brown shade and a near-constant, teasing smile.

_And she flirts. With pretty much everyone. To the credit of me, who hired her, she is also very good at her work. And you can't talk to her for very long without realising how intelligent she is._

"Work kept me up all night," I said flatly. It wasn't entirely true, but I doubted that I should discuss what had really happened with her. A secretary often becomes a confidant, if only because she's the person you spend the most time with, but there were things I didn't know how to confide in anyone.

Besides, she might decide to call an insane asylum for my own good…

Diana chuckled.

"I'm sure that counts as a waste of natural resources."

"Quite," I mumbled and fled into my office. I was far too aware that I was blushing. People tell me I am far too prudent. I never used to pay any attention to them. Some things were appropriate and some things weren't, and that was just the way it was, as far as I could see.

Now? I'm not sure. I've been forced to re-evaluate so many of my opinions…

I closed the door. I sat down behind my desk. I flipped through the "in" pile to get an impression of what I had to do today. All the while, I made a furious effort not to notice the big, white machine standing, quietly and smugly, _on the desk._

After a few minutes, though, I was all out of material things to occupy my attention with. This is the paperless age, after all – in the end, I _had to acknowledge the presence of my office computer. I stared darkly at it._

_Oh, come on, I told myself. __It's not even the same one. What're you so afraid of?_

But I already knew. I was afraid of _weirdness – of something I had no control over. I mean, if your computer can insult you after having been disconnected from the wall, you have moved far beyond what is so poetically called "the fields we know." And no matter who you were, you had no authority in that place._

But there was more to it than that. The whole thing was also a riddle – and I've always been a sucker for riddles. In the end, it was that thought more than anything else that made me switch on the computer.

I was in equal parts relieved and disappointed when I was logged into my account in the company network. Nothing special here. Well, to work, then. There were reports to be written and presentations to be prepared. Wouldn't do to let the team down, after all.

Only…

Only, my home computer hadn't started acting _really weird until I tried to write an email, had it?_

I shook my head. This was nonsense. I had work to do, and the last thing I needed was to get obsessed with what was probably just some kind of virus or something.

Still, it wouldn't take long at all to just give it a quick look. I surrendered to my irrational curiosity and opened the email program. The inbox list appeared on the screen just like a hundred times before. A few messages on the top of the pages were blinking, indicating something I hadn't read. I checked through them without much interest. All right, there were those sums I'd asked for, good, good… This was some kind of advertisement, delete that… And this…

… was simply a single line, no sender address, no topic, nothing.

_Why don't you ask her out?_

I blinked. This looked like some kind of self-help course for shy computer geeks to me, except that it didn't offer anything more than that simple question. No links. No addresses. No information.

_Why don't you ask her out?_

I closed the program.

A second later, it opened itself up again, going right to the letter this time. I felt a sting of fear mixed with a liberal amount of excitement. _Now we're talking!_

_Why don't you ask her out?_

"Who?" I said, feeling a bit amused. If this was a rerun of last night, the cast had changed. The person/program/whatever that had called me Farson had struck me as being filled with clichéd menace. This was just a pretty amiable question, if so a rather strange one.

Beneath the sentence, a picture appeared and came into focus. Diana, behind her desk, working. Like she probably looked this moment – but that thought was too insane even for this situation. That picture could have been taken anytime, really.

I smiled. It certainly did answer my question.

_Why don't you ask her out?_

"Because she's my secretary," I said patiently. "Okay, so I think she's attractive, but she _works for me. Ever heard of sexual harassment?"_

There was a pause, just long enough for me to start feeling dumb. Talking to an email! There was mental illness, and then there was plain, simple idiocy. Just because something freaky had happened to me last night it didn't mean that I had to start seeing mysticism in every shadow now.

Then the picture of Diana developed spots of blurriness, as parts of it started changing into something else. I wrinkled my brow. Whoever was behind this was certainly into the show-not-tell approach to answering questions. Now what?

First the desk in front of Diana disappeared, showing her, sitting on her chair, working on a computer that wasn't there anymore. Then she shifted position, in a series of small but noticeable steps with a few seconds between each, adapting a more comfortable position. She was now leaning back, grinning in that naughty way that always made me uncomfortable.

Then her clothes started to erase themselves. I stared for a second as they faded away into a greyish blurr, and then quickly looked away. Blushing furiously, I got up and turned around, looking out the window.

Granted, the Internet had a reputation for being easy to find porn on… but…

I made an effort to pull myself together. All right, so someone had fixed up a picture. That shouldn't be too hard, really, for someone who knew his stuff. You could put Diana's head on someone else's body and place the result in a familiar environment. That was _all there was too it._

Except I didn't believe that for a second. Not after last night. No, regardless of the utter stupidity of the thought, I believed that someone had actually managed to send me a picture that had never been taken – a picture of Diana with her clothes off.

Which brought me to a somewhat disturbing dilemma; how to get back to work without looking at it? I was sure that it wasn't appropriate of me to look at that photography, but it was sitting smack on the middle of the screen, and I would have to look at said screen in order to close the window.

Though… could it really hurt _that much if I just took a quick look? Just for the few seconds it would take me to erase that letter? No one would have to __know, after all…_

No! I had to keep myself under control here! There was such a thing as proper behaviour, and I would stick to it if it so meant the death of me!

Well. I might not be able to close the window, but I could probably get the hard-drive into the corner of my eye, and then sidle my way up to it and press "reset" – all the while without looking at the screen. That should take care of things.

I turned around ninety degrees clockwise. I found the big, white box at the edge of my vision. I started sidling. I reached the button. I pushed it.

The computer kept giving off the soft hum computers tend to give off when they are switched on. No sudden "VVOOOooooomm" sound of the fan relaxing. No strange bleeps and beeps as it started everything up again. Just the constant, infuriating "mmmmmmm" of a machine faithfully doing its duty.

I closed my eyes for a second. Great. Another one who didn't know when to quit. I had no doubt that even if I pulled the plug out of the wall, I'd still be faced with an active computer – and a picture it was not proper for me to look at.

The temptation came back, and stronger this time.

_It's not like I want__ to look, I told myself. __I just don't have much of a choice. This person, or whatever it is, wants me to see this photography. He won't allow me to start working until I have. I should humour him and look for a few seconds. Then he'll let me delete it and I can get back to what I'm supposed to be doing._

_And it's not like I haven't wondered, sometimes, is it…?_

I angrily pushed temptation, rationalisation, infatuation and what-have-you out of my mind. I was the youngest person ever to be one of Greystone's directors – that should mean that I was reasonably intelligent. Therefore, there was just no _way that I was going to let some nameless, faceless computer wiz make me do something I didn't want to do… okay, okay, something I wanted to do but knew I __shouldn't do, just because he had some tricks up his sleeve that might count as paranormal._

I didn't, strictly speaking, _have to stay here; I could violate my principles, take a load of work and do it at home. I was in charge around here; as long as I made sure my department kept delivering, I could do whatever I wanted. This infernal machine could stand here in an empty office for as long as it took before it got bored and gave it a rest._

Of course, I had a disobedient computer at home, too…

All right, a café or something, then. Or I could rent a hotel room – God knew I could afford it. I could go somewhere where there _were no computers. And sooner or later Mr. Mystery would get tired of the joke and give it up._

Wait. What if he didn't get tired of it for all the rest of the day? Then this incriminating picture would stay on the screen for that long. I could lock the door, but the cleaning crew, at the very least, had the key; they would come in and see it, and consider me to be some kind of pervert. And if someone told Diana, she could very probably sue me. I had studied a bit of corporate law, and I seemed to recall that there would be some grounds for a lawsuit in this case.

The idea of Diana dragging me to court over this seemed a bit strange, though. Would she really? I wasn't sure, but it didn't seem like her style. Teasing me about it for years to come, yes, but…

It didn't matter, though. Someone would _know, and I couldn't stand that thought. There had to be another way._

I could always smash the screen. Mr. Mystery could make technology do cartwheels, or so it seemed, but he apparently needed some functional technology to start with. Yes, that seemed like a flawless solution. I could say that I had accidentally pushed it off the desk. Clumsy me. No big deal.

I felt vibrant. Outsmarted you there, didn't I, you dirty-minded little weasel? Just one good shove, and away goes…

A hint out doubt appeared in my mind. Was I seriously considering to damage corporate property rather than to take one lousy look at a fairly harmless picture of a naked woman?

_Yes._

_Why? The voice was soft, polite, and unyielding. And familiar._

I guess everyone does it sometimes; creates a mental adversary to carry out an inner discussion. You know, at each point, that he's you – you're even aware that you're the one making up his lines. Still, you don't quite feel like he's not a different person. If nothing else, if he's not someone else, why's he so intent on proving you wrong?

_Because it's not right for me to look, I said. __And if I let anyone else see it, they'll think I've done something that's not right. This is the only way._

_Do you really think they'll care? __Hell, if a man sees it, he's far more likely to think "wow, Mister Stromberg really knows where to find good stuff," than "what a freak."_

_Doesn't matter.__ I don't want to be that way and I don't want to be seen that way. It's not who I am._

_Who are you?_

_Someone who knows what's right and proper.___

_What's right? What's proper?_

I paused. It wasn't that I never questioned myself, but this was getting a bit too far. Where was this coming from? Granted, I was getting close to the age when people traditionally look back on their lives and agonises over if they've lived it in the right way (and then goes on in exactly the same anyway as before, naturally), but even so. Why was I suddenly analysing my basic intentions?

It was this whole thing with the emails and messages and whatnot, I decided. It had shaken me up. The world I had known had been compromised, forcing me to ask some questions about my view of it – so first and foremost I had started asking questions about my view of myself. Very logical. Also sounding a lot like complete nonsense, but very logical nonetheless.

So; what was right and what was proper? I knew myself well enough to know that if I did anything before I had gotten my inner doubt to shut up, I was going to feel grudgy and out of shape the rest of the day. Self-disgust wasn't productive. I had to keep it away.

_Respecting other people's privacy is proper, I answered.__ Overriding your basic instincts is proper. Acting with dignity is proper._

_So it's okay to make a fool out of yourself in private, say by smashing a perfectly good screen for no sane reason, but not in front of others? my annoying inner voice asked smugly._

_Yes._

_It's not what you do, it's what people see._

_… yes… I thought hesitantly. I had never looked at it like that before. But of course, everything could be made to look like utter stupidity from the right point of view. That didn't mean that it was._

_So why don't you remove the picture yourself? No one would know._

I couldn't think of any way to respond to that. It was perfectly true, I was being inconsistent. Either what mattered the most was what others thought of me, or what mattered the most was what I thought of myself. And I had been acting in a way that implied that the latter was the case.

True, what others thought _was important, because it decided how well I was able to function in my position and in my personal life – what little there was of __that. But on balance, I had to admit that acting appropriately in an objective sense was more important than if others __thought I was acting appropriately._

And there was one option I had overlooked, wasn't there? One that allowed me to behave in a flawless way while taking care of the problem. And, unfortunately, one that would make me look like a proper fool.

I made a long detour around the desk, eyes towards the wall and opened the door.

"Diana, would you please help me with something?" I said, forcing the words to come out calmly and firmly.

Diana looked up and nodded with exaggerated sobriety.

"Indeed I would," she said, mimicking my, perhaps overly correct, pronunciation.

"There's a program running on my computer," I said. "I would like you to close it."

Dianna looked amused. I noticed that I was blushing again.

"Is this one of those military things?" she said. "Like when a new recruit is forced to do pointless stuff just to learn to obey orders?"

"No."

"Thing is," she went on, "I _have been working here for six months…"_

"This is not pointless," I said. "It would not be… in order… for me or for anyone else to do it. Or to even look at… this program. You're the only one who's entitled to do it."

Diana beamed at me.

"I feel so _special!" she said cheerfully._

I felt a headache coming on. I sighed and rubbed my forehead.

"Please just do it. And please keep in mind that it was sent to me. I didn't ask for it, and I certainly didn't manufacture it."

"This I need to see," Diana said, rolling her eyes. She walked into my office and looked at the computer. I braced myself for a scream of rage.

All I got, however, was an amused "Huh!" before she pressed a few keys and closed the mail window. Then she strolled out to me again.

"Mission accomplished," she said, raising her hand in a salute. "Was there anything else you wanted to… ask me?" She smiled innocently and fluttered her eyelashes.

I closed my eyes. My face felt like it was on fire. I wanted to sink through the floor. I hadn't felt this embarrassed since my elementary school bully had managed to pull my pants down in front of an entire corridor full of people. For that, I had rallied up some sympathisers – that particular prank was a bit cruel, even among third-graders – and beaten the living daylights out of him. I swore a solemn oath that I would do the same to this hacking menace if I ever got my hands on him.

"No," I said in a broken voice. "No, that would be all."

"Just saying, someone went through a lot of trouble," Diana said in a desperately controlled voice. Was she _laughing? I had a feeling that she was. "With…advertisement and all…"_

"Aren't you the least bit embarrassed about this?" I complained, opening my eyes again. She _was laughing silently, clasping her hand over her mouth and shaking in helpless mirth._

"Nope," she said. "I've got nothing to be ashamed of." She made a gesture at herself. "I mean, this _is pretty good for a lady in her mid-thirties, don't you think? That's healthy food and regular exercise for you… Okay, so maybe it's junk food and sitting in front of a computer all day and I've just got a good metabolism, but never mind that." She widened her eyes in mock outrage. "Don't tell me you had complaints?"_

"I didn't look," I said sternly.

"No? You missed something," she said smugly. "Well, how about it? Can you think of any questions you might want to ask me?"

I found to my horror that I could. Ninety-nine percent of me wanted to die from pure shame. The last percent thought that this situation was kind of… interesting. It pointed out, in no uncertain terms, that there was a smart, attractive woman here, and that it might be fun to get to know her outside of the office. It argued that if I did ask that question, things might at worst stay the same, and at best turn very interesting indeed. And it was starting to convert a few other treacherous percents into its way of thinking.

"No," I said firmly before the rebellion could work its way up to my head. "Let's get back to work."

She looked a bit disappointed (or was that just male pride fooling me?) but grinned and shook her head.

"It's your loss, mister."

I went back into my room, feeling rather the same way. Was I the stupidest man alive?

_No, I answered myself firmly. __I just know how to avoid behaving like a teenager. Isn't it enough that I've got some kind of crush on my secretary? That alone is enough to make me a walking cliché! It's pathetic, really. Just like that horny old general in Beetle Bailey__…_

That thought worked as a very efficient turnoff and restored most of my equilibrium. I was acting as I should act. I was being true to my ideals. I was, in fact, being a splendid example of how a mature, responsible, sensible man in my position should behave. The appearance of various super-hackers in my life had not ruffled my perfect understanding of what was correct behaviour.

There was, all in all, no reason why I should pay any attention to that little voice in my head that was making clucking noises…

I managed to work efficiently for almost an hour after the whole email incident had been handled. Heaven knew it was needed, what with me having to present the results of my department to the board tomorrow; still, I found it hard to concentrate. Everything seemed so depressingly… _mundane. Arguing with artificial intelligences or hacker geniuses or maybe (for all I knew) demons who had gone modern and was now possessing computers was distressing, but it was not boring._

That word made me hesitate as I was adding together a long column of numbers to make sure that the accountant responsible for doing that hadn't messed up. Boring? Since when did that word have any importance to me? You did what you had to do, and you did it well because that was a matter of pride – and beyond that, there was nothing. Boring, interesting… those descriptions had no meaning when it came to work. Work was important because it was work. Period.

This sudden change in my way of thinking disturbed me more than the weird things that had been happening. Why was I questioning things to the left and right? Idiocy! I had always had an inquisitive mind, but there were some things that just were the way they were. I had thought I had accepted that years ago, so why did all these doubts come over and plague me now? Hadn't it been enough to go through adolescent insecurity _once?_

I buried my head in work again to get it all off my mind. It worked. Until the phone rang.

"Yes?" I said gruffly after having pressed a button.

"There's a Patrick Farson who wants to speak with you," Diana said, completely undisturbed by my grumpiness. "I told him you were busy. He told me, more or less, that _no one is ever so busy that they can't speak to __him. Do you want me to patch him through?"_

Patrick. Patrick would be able to shed some light on this whole thing – by telling me who might want to send him threats, if nothing else. If he felt like sharing that information, that was. He wasn't the most informative of people.

"Yes," I said.

"Aw," Diana said. "And I was _so looking forward to telling him to piss off… Okay, here he comes."_

The phone line gave off a few clicking sounds, and then Patrick's voice snapped out of the speaker. Patrick's voice sounds almost like my own, but his tone of voice can always be described as 'snapping.' In the literal meaning of the word, even; when he speaks, you actually do get the feeling that he is whipping you with his voice.

I didn't let that bother me, though. I neither liked nor disliked Patrick. He had just always been there, popping into my life on irregular intervals and coming with odd requests. My father never wanted to discuss him, either. Patrick was an old friend of his, and that was all he was willing to say.

"Simon?" Patrick snapped.

"Yes," I said simply.

"We must meet."

I had more or less expected that. Patrick always wanted to meet me in person. I wasn't sure why; he certainly never seemed too happy about seeing me. It was always "you're not getting enough exercise" this and "stop using words like 'nasty,' it sounds childish" that, and while we were on the subject, when was I going to shave off that stupid beard?

But that, too, was part of the ritual. Getting rebuked by Patrick on occasion was just something I had to go through, and there was nothing to do about that. I had stopped caring long ago.

"Where?" I said.

Patrick mentioned a café.

"I'll be there in thirty minutes," I said. The line went dead as soon as I had finished talking.

The place Patrick had picked was a rather simple establishment, small and located some distance away from the city centre. It was, however, very clean, and the chairs and tables were organised in what almost seemed to be a mathematically calculated pattern. I could see why Patrick liked it; it was just his style. And, by all means, I could see some appeal in it myself. There are worse things in life than too much organisation.

Patrick was sitting in the most remote table available, holding on to a cup of black coffee like he was daring it to try to make a break for it. As far as I knew, we were not related, but he looked so much like me that it was almost uncanny. He was pretty tall, and had the kind of musculature built you get from spending time at a gym rather than the kind you get by lots of physical outdoor activity. He had brown hair that he kept flawlessly combed, and a broad face that was handsome in the robust way that few women are attracted by. I imagine most women would be frightened off by the way he glared at the world with those big, grey eyes, anyway. Not that Patrick cared about women. He was the ultimate equal rights activist; he treated everyone, whether male or female, as exactly as hopelessly lacking in all kinds of virtues as the next person.

"You're late," he noted as I sat down next to him.

"Sorry," I said. It was no use pointing out that it might be a question of one or two minutes. Excuses don't really cut it with Patrick. I knew that from childhood.

"And you look like shit," he added. "Are you drinking? **Answer truthfully."**

"No," I said immediately. I drink on formal occasions only. Anything else would be lowering your capabilities, and thereby your ability to carry out your duties.

"What is it, then?" he snapped. "**Answer truthfully."**

I was going to say that I had been up late last night, working. Then I would have let him say what he had to say, and then asked him how his life was going – was there anyone he was arguing with, for example? It would have been pretty transparent, I guess, but I'm honest by nature and not very good at withholding information. That said, I had every intention to tell him a lie now. I had the words clear in my head. It was just that somewhere on the way to my mouth, they turned into:

"Last night, my computer started threatening me. I couldn't switch it off. It called me 'Farson.' I was too worried and confused to get much sleep."

I felt surprised, but not as much as I might have. When Patrick spoke to you in that particular tone of voice he had, you just couldn't disobey. He had told me to answer truthfully, so that was what I had done. But I hadn't known that I could not even with all my willpower resist one of his orders.

That, I realised with some shock, was not natural. Not if he could make me tell the truth when I had absolutely no inclination to do it. It was not natural in the same way that disconnected computers delivering melodramatic threats was not natural.

"Oh, yes?" He snorted. "Well, you just let me handle that. It's just some fucking idiot playing around. **Tell me if you have any suspicions, ideas or knowledge of who caused what you just told me to happen."**

"I don't," I said. "But I'm going to find out. Do _you have any ideas of who it can be?"_

Patrick shook his head. It was more of a disgusted gesture than an answer to my question.

"Don't you mind that. **Tell me…"**

It was as if all of today and all of last night had been erased. There were no strange emails or inexplicable messages here. There were no mysteries to solve. The fact that I had overcome myself and humiliated myself in front of Diana rather than to humiliate myself in front of _myself had no meaning here. Everything was as it had always been._

I didn't matter. That's what he made me feel. That's what he had _always made me feel, I supposed. Patrick made me feel unimportant in roughly the same way as the sky makes you feel unimportant if you think too much about it. The sky is there. It's bigger than you. It can pour rain or hailstone at you, warm you or shade you, or it can kill you with a thunderbolt – all at its convenience. And not only can you not resist it, if you tried to it wouldn't even __notice…_

That was how Patrick appeared to me. And part of me welcomed it. He would take care of things. All I had to do was to be a good boy and obey, like I always did.

A much larger part of me, however, a part that felt new, roared out a _NO!_

"No!" I echoed. Suddenly I was angry. This was the most interesting thing that had happened to me in a very long time; he was not going to take that away from me. "You tell _me something for a change!"_

Patrick frowned. This was not part of our routine. He was supposed to sit here and ask me questions – all right, so maybe it was more a matter of demanding answers – for a while, have me tell him all about what happened with my work. Then he was going to ponder for a moment, and then tell me to do something. It wouldn't be anything very taxing; firing someone, making a suggestion to the board, calling up one of my political or financial contacts and asking a favour of some kind. That was how this worked. And no matter how calm Patrick looked, I had a notion that he was stunned by the very idea that I might oppose the order of things.

I felt a bit stunned myself, beneath the anger. This was not how I was supposed to act; I could feel the wrongness of it in every bone of my body. But that just fuelled the fury even more. Every time, every goddamn time Patrick called me I dropped everything and came to see him. I gave him information that was supposed to be confidential and I did him favours despite the fact that I got absolutely nothing in return. And the one time, the _one time I wanted something back from him, he just ignored it!_

"Such as?" he said. His voice was slow, almost lazy, but all his hands were tightened into fists on his lap.

"What did you mean when you said that it was some idiot playing around? I didn't even know you _could make a computer, or any machine, work like that! I thought I was going out of my mind!"_

Patrick winced and slowly relaxed.

"Oh, so _that's what's bothering you," he said. "Yes. It __is possible to do things like that. I don't know the theory, but it's possible. This is just some moron who's got his hands on a piece of experimental technology. I'll handle it. Now, then…"_

"I want to handle it myself," I insisted. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I was working on pure instinct – or perhaps I should rather say pure adrenalin. Part of me was staring in horrified disbelief as the rest of me acted like a disrespectful child, but for most parts, I felt angry and excited and…

… curious. Yes, that was it. I felt curious like never before, like I needed answers in the same way I needed oxygen. Patrick _knew something, and by God he was going to tell me!_

"But you're. Not. Going. To." Every word was calm, quiet and with all the force of a blow from a sledgehammer. I felt myself backing for a moment. I wanted to cover in fear and agree to do anything he said. But the next second, the feeling ebbed away. Whatever power he had over me, this order had not been propelled by it.

"Stop telling me what to do." I hated the tone of my voice; I sounded like a rebellious teenager. But Patrick wasn't my father, and I didn't have to…

Hmm?

"You're my father, aren't you?" I said, dumbstruck.

Patrick's chin didn't drop, because it's a well-disciplined chin that doesn't drop except when its owner wants it to. But he looked a bit ruffled.

"What?" he said.

"You are, aren't you?" I said. "It's so obvious! Why didn't I see it before? You look _exactly like me, for God's sake! For that matter, __why do you look exactly like me, when I know you're at least thirty years older than I am? Why can you give me orders I can't disobey? Why are you always asking me things? What's this all about?"_

I stopped, not because I was out of questions, but because I was out of air. I had plenty more things to ask; they just came bubbling up inside of me, too many to voice. I felt like I had been blind my entire life, but now I could see – only, what I saw didn't make any _sense. I had never, __never questioned my relationship with Patrick, it had __never dawned on me how strange it was. Why on Earth not? Had something been done to me so that I couldn't?_

That last idea made me stop in my mental tracks. So it was conspiracy theories now, then? _Was I losing my mind, after all? Horrible thought, could Patrick be your normal, average godfather, only now something in my brain had glitched and I started seeing him as someone completely alien?_

Patrick showed his teeth in something that completely failed to be a grin when he saw doubt spread all over my face.

"Listen to me," he said softly. "I am not your father. All this strange business has gotten to you. You are not thinking clearly. We will have to talk another time, when you have come to your senses. Now, **go back to work."**

I didn't want to. I wanted to get answers. I wanted to understand.

But I got up and walked away anyway.


	2. The Empowering

DISCLAIMER: The World of Darkness, the Virtual Adepts, the Technocracy, the use of the words "Awakening" and "Empowering," and the rules of true magick in general is the property of White Wolf. All individual characters are mine, though.

"Simon, I'm going to take my lunch break now, so if there's anything you… Hey, what are you doing?"

  Diana was very right in asking. I do not usually sit cross-legged on the floor, in the far corner of my office, sketching frantically on a notepad. That was, however, exactly what I was doing right now. Part of me had the decency to feel ashamed of being caught in this position, but another part pointed out that I'd already made a fool of myself in front of Diana today, so this wouldn't do much either way. The overwhelming majority of me, however, simply didn't care. I felt numb inside.

  "Writing down questions," I said weakly. I held up the notepad as proof. I was halfway down the third page.

  Diana nodded slowly.

  "O… kay…" she said warily. "Why aren't you doing it at your desk?"

  "Don't trust my computer," I said miserably. I was fully aware of how insane that sounded, but I was past caring at this point. I had gone out of my mind. That was all there was to it. And there seemed to be very little I could do about it, except keep scribbling down my questions. Perhaps I'd be cured if I could get them all answered. Of course, then I'd have to stop coming up with a new one every other minute or so…

  "I see…" Diana said. Her big, dark eyes shifted front side to side. I didn't think she was really nervous – if nothing else, I didn't really think I looked very threatening at the moment – but she seemed uncertain. Poor woman, I couldn't rightly blame her. "Can I see your questions?"

  I didn't have the strength to say now. My mind had been running on the highest gear for three hours now; that sort of thing left you feeling empty and worn out. I gave her the notepad. She eyed through it silently.

  "You are," she remarked, "demanding answers to pretty much every great philosophical mystery in the world. Oh, and then there's lots of stuff here about that bitchy guy who called you earlier. Along, I notice, with one or two questions along the lines of 'Where does seedless grapes come from?'"

  "Always wondered that," I mumbled, staring at the floor.

  "I think they take ordinary seeds and do some stuff to them so they change into seedless-grape seeds," Diana supplied.

  "Oh."

  "The rest will take a little more time, I'm afraid," she said. She raised one hand to cover her mouth. Was she _smiling? Really! My insanity was no laughing matter. "Why this sudden interest in theology and agriculture?"_

  I shrugged.

  "I don't know. These questions just keep occurring to me. So many questions…" I shook my head. "It started with Patrick, but now I feel like I want to know everything. I think you'd better call the cops or whoever it is who takes away madmen. Those guys in white coats, whatever they're called… Could I have that back, please? I want to add that question to the list."

  Diana obeyed. I wrote _What__ are those guys in white coats called? at the next available row._

  "Do you have to know for sure?" Diana said. "Because there's not a person on Earth who doesn't have some sort of opinion about things like 'Is there a God?' and 'Are people basically good or basically evil?'"

  "_I don't," I pointed out. Diana wrinkled her brow._

  "Really? You don't have a clue? Didn't you go through that stage as a teenager when you thought about things like this?"

  "Sure," I said. "But my parents told me to stop wasting my time and put my energy on studying."

  Diana gave off a snort of laughter.

  "Nice parents you've got. Okay, look, I think it's great that you have a crawing for information, but you don't have time to do this now. You've got an annual report to present. Tomorrow."

  "Can't," I said miserably. "Can't focus. Everything's too interesting."

  "Wait a second."

  Diana went back to her desk, rummaged through a drawer, and held up a diskette with the triumphing smile of a Paladin finding the Grail. She inserted it into her computer and entered a few commands.

  "Come and look at this for a while," she said.

  "No, no, no," I said tiredly. "No computers. Computers are out to get me. I've got questions about that too, you know."

  "Yes," Diana said merrily, "but this is a nice computer. It wants to be your friend. Come and look at it."

  I glared at her. She smiled back at me. I surrendered and looked at the screen.

  It didn't seem to be showing anything except some kind of screensaver program. All over it, colours were swirling and mixing, breaking apart and merging back together in a pattern that seemed to have very little organisation and even less meaning. I stared blankly at it. There was something very relaxing about it.

  "Yes, look at the colours," Diana whispered dreamily in my ear. I hadn't seen her move. I didn't want to take my eyes away from the display. "Stop thinking, stop hurting, stop wishing… Just look at the colours… and be still…"

  I could feel her breath against the side of my head. It was soothing, like a mother's caress – not that my mother had ever been one for caresses. The tension was disappearing from my muscles. The turmoil in my mind was starting to calm down, sinking back to the bottom of my soul.

  What remained of my consciousness suddenly realised that this was _also something strange; __also something I should know about. A spark of panic appeared in the tranquil waters of my mind, fighting to bring the rest of me back from the warm lassitude that had enveloped me._

  I felt the stillness decrease, just a little, because of my efforts.

  _I can fight this!_

  But in the end, I didn't want to. I was too tired. The fear ebbed away and I let the colours take me. The last thing I remember is Diana's voice, quiet and introvert.

  "Well, then, Simon… What _are we going to do with you…?"_

After that, things are spotty for a while. My memory is vague and surreal, like recalling a dream – but why would anyone dream of working? Because that's what I did; I worked, efficiently and well, without a thought in my mind that didn't have to do with the next calculation to make, the next paper to read, the next message to send. No questions bothered me. No strange emails appeared on my computer. The last twenty-four hours might as well have been nothing but a figment of my imagination.

  Finally, I was done. Everything handled thoroughly and well; all finished to the board presentation tomorrow. There was a certain amount of satisfaction in that, and if I felt somehow… empty… well, that was nothing I should worry about. An alcoholic undoubtedly felt empty, too, once he had given up the bottle. The things that fulfilled us were rarely good for us; the proper, healthy thing to do was to look past what you wanted to what you needed. To what was right and good for you.

  Not until I was driving home did I start to wonder exactly what it was I was missing. Something had been taken, something had been removed. Something that had hurt me, but also made me feel… elevated.

  No. That thought felt wrong.

  Not removed. Hidden. Covered. Dampened.

  All right, all right, so something had been _hidden – but I still didn't know what. It had something to do with Patrick, and… and Diana… but…_

  The questions. The realisation made my eyes go wide. I had had so many questions in my head, for too many to cope with. And then Diana had said… had said…

  _Look at the colours._

_  Look at the colours, and be still._

  It came back piece by piece, everything up to that point. And then it was just _blank. My next memory was working. Without a question in my head._

  Peculiar.

  "Diana's a part of it," I said out loud. I was alone in my car, thank heavens, otherwise people would have been looking very funnily at me indeed. "Whatever _it is."_

  I tapped my fingers against the wheel, thinking hard. That gave me four people who were all trying to pull my strings. There was the hacker who had gotten into my home computer, and the hacker who had gotten into my office computer. I couldn't believe that they were the same person; the former had been threatening, but the latter had just been teasing. In an inexcusably annoying way, true, but still just teasing. Then there was Diana. And finally, there was Patrick.

  And Patrick was a greater mystery than the other three combined, because I had known him for all my life, and I had never once realised that there was something out of the ordinary with him. Not with his infrequent visits, not with his seemingly random orders, not with the apparent power he had over me. Or, for that matter, with the fact that he never seemed to age. In my earliest memory of him, he had been my father's age. Now he was _my age._

  There were certain things, I had always felt – up to today, that was – that you didn't question. Some things were like the sky or the sea; they were just _there, and it didn't do anyone any good to think about them, because the answer to every __Why? was always just __Because! Patrick had, without me giving it any thought, been transferred to that category. Why did he do the things he did? Because._

  'Because' didn't feel like an adequate answer anymore.

  I parked my car in the garage and got into the elevator up to my apartment. Whatever Diana had done to me, I reflected, was wearing off. I didn't feel swamped with questions anymore, but I felt curious and inquisitive. The existence of God could wait; right now, I wanted to figure out just what the hell was going on around me. And doing that, I might be able to figure out what was happening to _me._

  If Diana's… hypnosis, or whatever you should call it… was losing its grip of me, did that mean that she had intended it to be a temporary thing only, or was I just fighting my way past it? The answer to that might be crucial.

  As it was, she had done me a favour; I was ready for tomorrow and wouldn't have to make a fool of myself in front of my fellow directors by admitting that I wasn't quite done yet. That would probably not have been the case if I had had to cope with philosophy, conspiracy theories and general enquires running through my mind all day. But had she _meant to do me a favour? Or had she tried to put my mind back to sleep permanently? To turn me back into an unquestioning pawn for Patrick?_

  Because that was what I had been, wasn't it? Patrick had told me to study economy. Patrick had told me to start working for Greystone. Patrick had told me that I must do everything I could to get promoted. And I had obeyed him every step of the way. Because I had never, ever questioned him.

  It was time to start doing some heavy questioning.

  Locking the door to my home, I decided that, for now, I would thrust Diana. I supposed that I had every reason not to. She knew more than she was letting on. She had access to whatever supertechnology the hackers and, I had to assume, Patrick had. I should really thrust her considerably shorter than I could throw her, but…

  But she had called Patrick 'that bitchy guy.' That didn't sound like someone who was working for him. Patrick wouldn't accept that kind of attitude in a subordinate.

  _Isn't that a bit thin? a voice said in my head. __Hardly what you'd call conclusive evidence._

  Maybe. But I also liked her. I was starting to realise, with a certain amount of surprise, that I didn't like Patrick. Never had, for that matter.

  _Oh, come on! That's subjective!_

  _Reality is subjective… another voice whispered. What did that __mean, exactly? I was way past the point where I could just write it off as nonsense. What had my cliché-crazed hacker friend meant by it? More to the point, why had he assumed that it would annoy Patrick to hear it?_

  Or was it _I who should have been annoyed to hear it? If Patrick was really my father – and that would indeed answer at least one question out of the millions I had – then my last name should rightly be Farson and not Stromberg. But that didn't make sense. Reality is subjective – that meant nothing to me. It sounded vaguely philosophical, but it was obviously a false statement. Reality was very much objective, no matter how much people might wish it otherwise. There was no reason to tell me those words in such a smug, menacing way, like they were an insult to everything I believed in._

  All right – back to the previous assumption. Why would it annoy Patrick?

  Well, because Patrick was Patrick. He didn't like things that were subjective. If something was subjective it meant that someone could have another opinion about it than him and still not necessarily be wrong. As far as Patrick was concerned, to disagree with him _was to be wrong. I could certainly believe that the mentioning of something that sounded like the worst kind of crystal-waving New Age philosophy would drive him into a rage, especially if there was some deeper meaning to it for him._

  I glanced at my computer with a sting of fear, but it just stood there, silent and peaceful. I took up the phone instead, dialling my parents' number.

  It rang six times before my father answered, sounding groggy and cranky. I supposed that old men needed their sleep, but I couldn't sympathise with him right now. Not if he had been lying to me my whole life.

  "Stromberg," he croaked.

  "It's me," I said. "Who's Patrick?"

  "Simon?" I could almost see how he blinked and wrinkled his brow, trying to wake up enough to deal with this. "Whasse matter…?"

  "Patrick Farson. Who is he?"

  "What do you mean?" He sounded a little bit less groggy, but he sounded just as cranky. "He's your godfather. He's a friend of the family. You know that. Why're you calling me up at…" He made a pause. "… at half past midnight asking me this?"

  "Because I need to _know, father." I bit my teeth together. "Where did you meet him? What does he work with? I don't know __anything."_

  "Ask him yourself!" my father snapped. "Can't imagine what you're thinking, calling me at this ungodly hour…"

  "He wouldn't answer any questions I asked," I said. I wasn't entirely sure that that was the truth – he _had answered my question about if it was possible to feed electricity into a disconnected machine – but I __was sure that I couldn't get in touch with him. I didn't have his number or his address; he had always contacted me. "__Where did you meet him?"_

  It was silent in the other end for a moment, except for my father's ragged breaths.

  "What does it matter?" he then growled. "Calling me in the middle of the night and asking me…"

  A cold premonition went through me.

  "You don't know, do you?" I said with a hint of dread in my voice. "You can't remember how you met."

  "So what if I can't?" my father said grumpily. "I'm an old man. Memory's slipping."

  I winced. My father was in his early sixties, and no matter how much he might complain about his aching joints, there was nothing wrong with his memory. At the very least he never seemed to have any trouble remembering everything I owed him, and how little I had done to repay those depths.

  "Sorry for wakening you, father," I said gently and hung up. I stood by the phone for a long while, staring into space.

  Patrick had done something, probably before I was even born. He had used some sort of technology, something like what Diana had used on me perhaps, to make my parents think of him as someone who had always been there and who was a natural part of their lives. Just as I had done.

  What sort of game was he playing with the Stromberg family?

  And how could I stop him? Was there any way at all that I could stop him? What if he said, in his special, commanding voice, 'go jump out in front of a train.' Would I do it?

  I was very much afraid that I would.

The next day I spent going over the year's progress with the rest of the board, which is not something I wish to elaborate on. It involves listening to endless reports and paying enough attention that you can part-take in the following discussion and come with intelligent suggestions on how various trends can be maintained, enhanced or diverted. It is enough to make a strong man cry with pure boredom.

  A certain type of strong man, anyway. I don't think anyone actually finds these meetings _funs, but a lot of my colleagues appear to derive a strong sense of satisfaction from them. They are elite players in the game of business. They are forcing an unwilling world to hand over its money to them and the company. They are doing what they like doing, and they are doing it well. Being happy is more than just having fun._

  Happiness is, however, not something I have put a lot of thought into. Most of my life, I have simply done what I have been expected to.

  About halfway through the meeting, it occurred to me that that might not be the cleverest way to live your life. At the very least I should ask myself _why I was expected to do these things. What had I, when it came right down to it, __achieved?_

  Well, I had quite a bit of money, power and personal prestige. If someone asked me what I had done with my life, I could definitely hand over a progress report. I might not have been overly happy, but I had certainly been productive.

  On the other hand; I didn't really need all that much money. I was living in pretty much the same way as I had three promotions ago – the extra cash was just piling up in my bank accounts. My interest in luxury was limited. It was certainly nice to be able to have lunch in fine restaurants every day, and there is something to be said for driving a BMW and wearing custom-made suits, but the effort used for getting those things seemed a bit overly high.

  Power was a pleasant thing to wield, certainly. Being able to get the world to do it your way satisfies something deep within most people – a memory, perhaps, from that long-ago time when we were at the bottom of the food chain and had enough trouble just keeping the world from _deleting our entire species. But considering that Patrick could just snap his fingers and have me do anything he wanted to, all power I might wield was largely illusional, really._

  I could appreciate prestige, but I wasn't entirely sure who I was trying to impress. My parents? They _had to be proud of me, as long as I didn't screw up too badly. It was in the parent job description. Patrick? To hell with __him. Myself? Well, there was that warm inner glow of a job well done, but…_

  At about that point I realised that I had been staring into space for ten minutes and had no idea what the director of television (comedy division) was talking about. I took a firm grip of myself and managed to keep my existential angst down for the duration of the meeting.

  To my great gratitude, it didn't take as long as I had thought it would. It had been a rather undramatic year, really. We were making money. We were following our development plan. We were actually, on the whole, doing a darn fine job, which my esteemed colleagues decided to celebrate with a big dinner together. I was invited along, but decided not to go. I had a bit too much on my mind to be entertaining company at the moment.

  I went to my office to do some thinking. Of the two places where I was comfortable and at home, this one had the friendlier computer.

  It was rather tragic, really, the grounds on which I made decisions these days…

  Diana was there, though. I suppose I should have realised that she would be – directors do work hard for their money, but secretaries work hard for considerably less money. Life isn't fair, unfortunately – though I might have been less philosophical about it if I was a secretary instead of a director, I must admit.

  I didn't really want to meet her at this point, but once I was through the door to her office, I didn't really have any way to retreat with dignity.

  "Hi," she said. "Did the meeting go well?"

  "Yes… er…"

  How do you talk with someone who, as late as yesterday, hypnotised you through the use of some sort of superadvanced computer software and now refused to acknowledge that fact? I mean, it's not really something you can work into the conversation. Besides, what if you do bring it up and the other party refuses to admit that it happened? Then your next stop is the nuthouse.

  And to look at it from another angle, even if you decide _not to talk about the whole hypertechnology hypnosis part, what do you talk __about? Having a thing like that in the back of your head makes it rather hard to come up with smalltalk._

  Maybe that is why I said what I did next.

  Though I wouldn't count on it, considering.

  "What's it all about?" I said. "Life, I mean. What are you supposed to _do with it, when you get right down to it?"_

  Diana smiled and scratched her head.

  "I could check my job description, but I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to know the answer for questions like that," she said amiably. "I kind of specialise more in questions like 'How many copies of _Path of Black Fire did we sell last year?' and 'At which time am I supposed to have lunch with the principle for the School of the Arts?'"_

  I felt rather silly, but then, I didn't really think I could make more of a fool of myself in front of Diana than I already had. For that matter, I didn't really think she'd care if I made a fool of myself. She'd just think it was funny.

  "Yes, but you said that everyone's got an opinion," I argued. "So you've got to have one, too. Can't you tell me what it is?"

  "I knew it was only a matter of time before you realised the depths of my divine wisdom," Diana said smugly and leaned back in her chair, her arms lazily folded behind the back of her neck. That position put certain aspects of her into focus. I did my very best not to notice. And failed, of course. The male perception has its own priorities. "Well, let me put it like this, what do you most want to do right now?"

  There was no way I was going to tell her that. So I went for what I had most wanted to do when I stepped through the door. It was still holding second prize, anyway.

  "I want to know who Patrick is and what he wants with me," I said.

  "See? Then that's the meaning of your life," Diana said proudly.

  I immediately spotted a flaw in that reasoning.

  "What if I changed my mind and want something else?" I pointed out.

  "Then the meaning of your life will change too," Diana said without missing a beat.

  I pondered that for a second, while she grinned in that annoying, disturbing, infuriating, adorable way at me.

  "So what you're saying," I said, measuring every word, "is that the purpose of life is to do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it?"

  "Can you think of anything better?" she said simply.

  I couldn't. But I had a strong feeling that I ought to be able to. The whole point of a _meaning with life, after all, was that it was fixed. Specified. Something to hold on to and use to chart a course. To have the meaning of life be to just follow your impulses, I felt, was rather like removing the whole point of the concept._

  "All I'm saying," she said reasonably, "is that either you can go nihilistic and say that nothing matters, or you can just assume that everything you want or do shakes heaven and earth. And the second one is more fun."

  "I'm sure there's some sort of logical flaw in that," I said in a suffering tone of voice. I knew that I was beaten, but I didn't want to leave the battlefield without putting up at least a token defence.

  "Probably," she said happily.

  I pulled up one of the chairs that were there for the use of people waiting to see me and sat down.

  "If I ask you a question," I said, "will you give me an honest answer?"

  "You never know. I just might."

  I supposed I couldn't really expect more than that at this point.

  "Am I going insane?" I said.

  Diana clicked her tongue, her expression thoughtful.

  "It might end up that way," she said after a moment. "But in that case, it'll be an effect, not a cause. And I think you can get through it."

  That didn't make me feel that much better. I wasn't as sure as she of my own mental stability. A bit more of this, I felt, and I would crack like an egg. Not because of the general weirdness that had suddenly entered my life, but because of this endless, infernal curiosity and self-analysis that I apparently couldn't shake free of. I felt as if my entire personality was being peeled like an onion. And the really bad part was that I was the one doing the peeling. I just couldn't help myself.

  "Well," I mumbled. "Thanks for that. I don't suppose you'd care to tell me just what _is happening to me?"_

  She shook her head.

  "I can't. Not yet, anyway. I've got… people to answer to."

  I opened my mouth, and then closed it again. I had intended to point out that _I was the person she was expected to answer to. But that would have been rather naïve, I supposed. Corporate hierarchy had very little room in this._

  "So there really is a conspiracy going on here?" I said slowly.

  She grinned, a bit sheepishly.

  "That's such an ugly word. Besides, there are not enough of us to be a proper conspiracy." Her smiled died away. "And now I've probably said too much already."

  "I would not want to put you in trouble," I said, realising that it was true. Not because there was a proper way to behave, but because I honestly did not want to cause difficulty for her.

  That, I couldn't help noticing, was an unexpected development. I had acted selflessly all my life, always putting the group's interests ahead of my own. But I had done that just because, well, that was how you acted. That was how a proper human being acted. This was something else entirely.

  Being nice because you wanted to be. Hmm. Such a strange concept…

  "That's sweet of you." She smiled at me. "It'll be okay, Simon. I promise. I went through it and came out all right. So can you."

  I blinked, startled.

  "_You went through…?"_

  She chuckled.

  "Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're not unique. What's happened to you happens to people all the time. Think of it as a second puberty, except that less than one in a thousand goes through it. I call it the Empowering. I've talked to others who call it the Awakening. It's a matter of what aspect of it you want to emphasise, I guess."

  That actually did make me feel a bit better. This thing had a name. Something that had a name could be defined. What could be defined could be controlled. Besides, a lot of people apparently went through it. Diana had gone through it. That meant that it probably wasn't going to kill me, or drive me insane.

  Probably.

  "Thank you for telling me," I said sincerely.

  "Yeah. Well." She grinned wryly. "Wouldn't do to have you running around without a clue. No matter _how fun it is to watch."_

  I harrumphed.

  "I'm glad that my misery is a source of amusement for _someone," I said with exaggerated suffering in my voice._

  "You'll look back on this and laugh someday, I promise," Diana said lightly.

  "You know, I've never liked that expression. Why should I suffer just to entertain my future self? What's that bastard ever done for _me?"_

  Diana laughed. She had a very appealing laugh, I noticed, soft and clear and happy.

  "There is that," she agreed, still chuckling. "See it as charity to yourself. They do say it begins at home, and last time I checked, you lived alone."

  "You can see it that way, I supposed." I winced. "Here's an idea. Have dinner with me tonight. It'll be fun. I can cross-examine you about Empowerings and conspiracies and things like that, and you can cleverly sidestep all my questions and eat for free while you're doing it."

  Diana tilted her head and looked at me, amused.

  "Are you asking me out?"

  "Well…"

  "On a _date?"_

  "Certainly not," I said dryly. "I can't date my secretary. How would that look?"

  "So I shouldn't wear something tight with a plunging neckline?" Diana said innocently.

  I pondered the image those words conjured up for a moment.

  "Do all Empowered people care as little about how things will look as I seem to do at the moment?" I said, resigned.

  "The best kind does."

_I have gone insane, I told myself as I stepped out of the shower and started wiping myself with a towel. __I have finally gone insane. It's the stress. Yes, that's it. Too much stress. Some people can take a high-pressure job and some people can't. I, to my shame, can't. I'll end up in a straightjacket before this is over._

  I had actually asked my secretary out to dinner. Forget the General in _Beetle Bailey – at least he had a sensible secretary with the wits to turn him down. I, on the other hand, had Diana Helsing, a woman apparently completely unaware of just how much of a fool I was making of myself. She wasn't exactly looking well herself, but at least she would be seen as intelligent and sensible, if perhaps a bit overly much so. I had money. Going out with me was a clever move, rather than one inspired by pure lust, as the case apparently was with me._

  What had I been _thinking?_

  Okay, so maybe I knew what I had been thinking. Quite a large part of my brain was still thinking it. What I wanted to know was why I wasn't thinking what I should be thinking, which was about what was proper and fitting.

  "Oh, get a grip of yourself!" I sighed as I put on a pair of trousers.

  Yes. I had to get a grip of myself. I shouldn't be thinking like this. I had already stated to myself that what people thought of me wasn't important as long as I could prove to myself that I was, indeed, doing exactly what I should be doing. That, apparently, was part of what it meant to be Empowered. Whatever that was.

  Well, yes – all that was still there. I could feel the inquisitive mindset sitting in my head. It was just temporarily covered with conformist panic and could therefore not help me at present. It would probably be back to harass me later, but now that I needed it, it wasn't doing a damn thing for me. How typical.

  I couldn't keep from laughing a bit at myself. Dear God, but I was a mess. Of course, I was a mess with a date, that had to count for something…

  When I stepped out into the hallway, buttoning my shirt, I saw that my computer was running. I tried to convince myself that I had been the one to switch it on. A few days ago, I probably could have done it. Right now, however, my ability to fool myself had decreased drastically.

  "All right, spit it out," I said wearily. "Hurry up, though. I've got an appointment."

  Big, red letters appeared on the screen. They were shivering and dripping. I winced. A message written in virtual blood. A ghost story for a new century, perhaps.

  _We see you, Farson._

  "I'm not Farson," I said. "Which, as I recall, I've already informed you of."

  The words melted together in a big blob of red. Then new ones formed out of it.

  _Reality is subjective, Farson._

  Slowly, I started to relax. Clearly, this was just the same message displayed again. Maybe there was some subroutine in whatever weird program was doing that, making it repeat itself every other day. In which case, I was under no obligation to talk to it. I could just finish getting dressed and leave, and then it could blab on without me.

  That theory was quickly blown to pieces as a third message appeared.

  _The time has come, Farson._

  Then the entire screen shifted, turning into a kaleidoscope of prisms and fragments and geometrical shapes, in every colour of the rainbow. I scratched my beard with one hand and absently kept buttoning my shirt with the other. Well… _this was new…_

  I flinched as I heard a buzzing sound and saw a flash of electricity connect the monitor with the desk for a brief second. A moment later, there was another one, between the harddrive and the floor this time. The air started to smell like burned plastic. I felt my hair break free of the careful combing I had subjected it to and stand up in every direction.

  What the hell…?

  I slowly backed away, towards the front door. Should I run for it? Was this thing going to explode? At this point, the fact that a computer contained nothing explosive did nothing to make me believe that it could not blow up, should my enemy want it to. Either he knew the laws of physics hell of a lot better than any scientist I had ever heard of, or he could just ignore them when he wanted to.

  Something kept me back, though. It was the damn curiosity again – the same, I daresay, that killed the proverbial cat. Something was _happening. I wanted to know what it was. It felt wrong to turn my back on it and flee for my life. Death, it seemed – to part of me at least – was a cheap price to pay for satisfying my curiosity._

  Madness!

  But even so.

  However, nothing exploded. Instead, the flickering shapes no the screen started to take a kind of form. They gathered into an uneven disc, forming pointy ears, elliptic eyes, a broad nose, an impossibly wide mouth with triangular teeth in it…

  A face. But not human by any stretch of the imagination. It was a little like a chimpanzee, but apes tend to be ugly in a somehow lovable way. This chimpanzee looked cunning and mean and predatory. And it was still made up of geometric forms; all hard, sharp edges and mind-numbingly complex patterns, without any of the softness of real life.

  A scream came out of the speakers, shrill and furious. The resonance was strange; I got the feeling that it had been created by someone mixing frequencies together, rather than by the rather more simple method of recording a living animal's sound.

  At this point, my curiosity decided that all right, enough was enough. It had had its fill now. If I wanted to get the hell out of there, I was very welcome to do so. I turned around and tugged at the door. It didn't budge. For a moment, I stood dumbstruck; then I realised that I had locked it when entering, and I had to unlock it to get out.

  And at the moment, my panicked brain couldn't recall where I had put my keys.

  I glanced over my shoulder, without being able to help myself. What I saw made me doubt my sanity for about the thousandth time in the last few days. The ape-thing was _leaving the screen, sliding out of it and becoming three-dimensional, in some twisted mockery of a birth. Its long, skinny arms flailed around, seeking support to pull it further out. I heard the legs of the chair scratch against the floor as the ape-thing managed to pull it towards it. For some reason, that made it all seem real. Regardless of how impossible all this was, the creature was interacting with the physical world. Which meant that it could interact with __me if it wanted to._

  Had I had any doubts which sort of interaction it was aiming for, they had died when I had heard that scream.

  I remembered that my keys were in the trousers I had used for work, and they hung on a chair in my bedroom. I had to cross the living room to get there.

  Shit.

  I ran for the bedroom door, staying as far away from the data-spawned monstrosity as I could. It was free up to the waist now, a long, lanky shape made out of a myriad of angular forms. It screeched at me as I rushed past, and a slender arm lashed out at me. It wasn't long enough to reach me, but the attempt still made me gasp.

  I reached the chair and fumbled through the pockets of the pants. For a nightmarish moment I couldn't find anything. Then my hand closed around cold metal. My keys! Hallelujah! Now I just had to make that run one more time, and then…

  When I turned around, the ape-thing stood in the doorway. It had managed to get loose faster than I had thought. It raised its head and screamed at me again, that artificial-sounding scream of pure, dumb hatred that made my skin crawl.

  "Go away!" I cried. "Go _away!"_

  It didn't. Instead, it took a wary step in through the door. If there was sentience in those angular eyes, I didn't see it, but it still moved with purpose. It was a computer program, it occurred to me. It was a computer program that had left the computer.

  _So that's what they really look like, I thought, terror-dizzy. __Gosh. If I had known that, I wouldn't have been so calm about working with them all the time._

  I lifted the chair and threw it at the creature. As I said, I'm a big guy. I can put a lot of strength into something like that.

  The ape-thing was knocked to the floor. Though it looked a bit like it was made out of steel, the sound of its body hitting the floorboards wasn't that of metal against wood. It was a drawn-out, painful hum, like the one you get when your computer is acting up. After a hundred system malfunctions, I had come to know and hate that sound. Now it offered some hope, though. Maybe this thing could be hurt…

  Or not. It threw the chair aside and got up, apparently no worse for its experience. It hissed at me and continued its slow advance. I backed away, glancing at the window. Four floors? Could you survive a jump like that? Probably not. You'd break every bone in your body.

  The creature took another step. Was that _expectation I saw on its artificially simian face? I supposed that it was not that far-fetched. Humans are made to reproduce, so for most of us, the most enjoyable thing in the world is having sex. This thing was made to kill people. It stood to reason that it would find it pleasant._

  It didn't seem that I could stop it, either. It was faster than me, and I couldn't harm it. If I had had a gun, maybe, but not with just hands, feet and whatever improvised weapon I could get my hands on here. I didn't even have anything hard left to throw at it.

  My eyes fell on the bed.

  The creature gave off a surprised shriek and stopped in its tracks, as if it could read my mind. I felt a surge of returning hope slam into me. _Not so invincible after all, you little pest?_

  I ripped the cover from the bed and threw it over the creature.

  The cover landed peacefully over the monster, turning it into a lump on an otherwise flat surface. I heard a muffled scream, and the lump started moving, trying to get to and edge. I growled like an animal and threw myself at it, wrapping the cover around it and lifting it into the air. It struggled in my arms, but it didn't have enough freedom to put any strength into its motions.

  No time to bother with latches. I slammed the package into the window with all my strength. There was a sharp sound that seemed to be as high as a gunshot, and a network of cracks appeared over the glass.

  A sharp claw bit through the cloth and cut into my wrist.

  I hit the window again, screaming in panicked rage. This time it broke apart, showering the street below with glass.

  A hand made of fractals and geometry stuck out through the widening whole in the cover, reaching around blindly. A burning pain started to grow in my wrist; I wasn't sure how badly the thing had cut me, or what the effects of being wounded by it were. For all I knew, it was poisonous. For all I knew, there were consequences of being touched by a computer program that I had never heard about – on account of it never having happened to anyone but me!

  I put the cover-bundle out over the empty street and allowed it to unroll. The ape-thing screamed and held on to it with one clawed hand, as it was hanging over the forty-foot abyss. It looked up at me. This time there _was hatred in its eyes, no matter how soulless._

  I grinned insanely at it. I couldn't help myself.

  "Screw with me when I've had a rough week?" I said pleasantly. "Bad idea."

  Then I let go of the cover. The monstrosity screamed one more time, but that sound was cut off as it hit the pavement. In its stead, that error-sound reached me, rising quickly to an almost unbearable volume… and then fell silent.

  I sank down by the wall beneath the window and panted. My wrist was killing me. Three deep gashes stretched across it, all at least three inches long. My heart was pounding like it wanted to leave my chest. I was soaked in cold sweat, making my shower earlier a complete waste of time.

  Okay, let's see. I had to call someone to fix the window. I had to bandage my wounds. I had to take another shower. That should take, hmm, an hour more or so.

  "Hello, Diana?" I said, just to see how it sounded. "I'm going to be a bit late. I've just wrestled a nightmare from beyond the fields we know…"


	3. Secondary

_DISCLAIMER: The World of Darkness, the Virtual Adepts, the Technocracy, the use of the words "Awakening" and "Empowering," and the rules of true magick in general is the property of White Wolf. The characters are mine, but their world is not._

_Of course, anyone who is familiar with the setting will notice that I am shamelessly altering it to suit my story, but then, the fact that reality is subjective is the very cornerstone of the mages' existence, so I hope I can be forgiven… =]_

I needn't have worried. Diana didn't seem to see anything strange with that excuse. She just asked me – without sounding too concerned – if I was all right, and said that she'd expect me an hour later. I actually found that attitude more bothering than the monster itself. Did this sort of thing happen to Empowered people _regularly? Maybe I should request a licence for a gun. A very big one._

After having showered, bandaged and dressed myself, called someone to fix my window by tomorrow afternoon and called the restaurant to move my reservations one hour ahead, I managed to walk out the door with just a slight delay. The only thing that had required all that much effort was the restaurant. The whole point of reservations is that they are for a fixed time, so they can't really be moved. I had to inform the restaurant person of exactly how many people I knew who could make his life difficult if I just asked them nicely before he agreed to make an exception.

Six months ago, I wouldn't have considered doing something like that. Now, I just felt a bit ashamed of myself – and wasn't that a hint of naughty pleasure I felt, as well? That bothered me a little. Redefining myself a bit I could live with (unless I went insane from redefining every single bit of my personality), but I wasn't sure that I wanted to redefine myself into a conscienceless autocrat.

On the other hand, I _did have an important date. Most people would probably be understanding. Well, most male people, anyway. At least if they got a look at Diana._

I managed to ring Diana's doorbell within forty-five minutes of my call to her. With my left hand. My right one didn't exactly feel poisoned, which was a bit of a relief, but it sure did ache.

Diana opened, and suddenly my hand was very far from my mind. I gaped. She was stunning in office clothes. Now she was wearing an armless white dress. The colour went very nicely with the warm brown of her skin, and as promised, that dress did look like it had been sewn on her.

She grinned at me and spun around like a model.

"What do you think?" she said.

Somewhere in my overheated mind I found the ability to speak.

"Luh… Lovely," I said, not too smoothly, but without making a _complete fool out of myself for once. "You're beautiful."_

"I know," she said modestly. "But it's nice of you to notice. Shall we?"

She held out an arm for me to take. I did so, after a moment hesitation. I managed to catch a glimpse of her apartment before she closed the door, though.

"Do you live in a workshop?" I asked as we walked down the stairs. She winced.

"No, I'm just doing some fine adjustments to my computer."

There was the C-word again. I was starting to wish curses and damnation over all microchips. Had there _really been something wrong with a paper-based filing system?_

"Fine adjustments? You've got strange electronic gadgets covering every flat surface!"

Diana smiled sheepishly.

"Well, 'fine' is a relative term…"

I dropped the subject. I wanted to ask her exactly what she was doing, but the answer was bound to give me a headache, if I even got an answer.

I'm fairly good at first dates, even if I do say so myself. I'm charming. I'm attentive. I'm genuinely interested in people's past and interests, which make them feel flattered. First dates have never really been a problem for me.

It's relationships I'm terrible at. After a while, women tend to get tired of me. I don't care enough, they say. I don't _feel enough, they say. It's like I'm not even __there, they say. A few has accused me of being afraid of commitments. Most of them just decide that turning me into decent boyfriend material is just __way too much work, whatever my problem might be._

That used to hurt me when I was a great deal younger. I couldn't help what I felt, so why couldn't anyone take me for who I was? I told Patrick about that once, when he asked me why I was 'moping all the time.' His response was that mature women would be able to appreciate an efficient personality in a way that teenage girls didn't, so I should just bide my time until I got a bit older.

He was wrong, of course. Mature women are even _less able to respect efficiency. Most of them want men who might make good husbands and fathers, and emotionally distant workaholics don't fit that description. And those who're just looking for a quick fling want __exciting men, and I don't fit that description either. As I said before, I don't think Patrick is that interested in or experienced with women._

I had stopped dating almost entirely in the last few years. I guess I had resigned. I was apparently not fit for romance. I suppose not all people are. But I'm still good at first dates. Generally.

With Diana, I felt inferior. Listening to the story of her life would take significantly much more than this one evening. Diana had done _everything._

"Wait," I said at one point. "Could you step back for a moment? I think I'm a bit lost."

We were currently enjoying a very good steak at the restaurant. In candlelight. I may be unfit for romance, but I know what it's supposed to look like.

"Sure." Diana managed to eat twice as fast as I did, without breaking good table manners noticeably. She was currently attacking her vegetables with knife, fork and a warrior spirit. "Where did you get lost?"

"Well, you were twenty-four, correct?" I said. "And you were broke, which was what made you marry this Henry Silverberg…"

"Well, he was cute too," Diana said shamelessly. "But the fact that he was working his way through his sixth million at the time _was the heaviest weighing factor of my decision to say 'I do,' yes."_

"Well, what happened to the modelling job?" I said. "How did you get broke all of a sudden?"

"Oh, that." She chuckled. "I stopped doing that the year before. I mean, it _pays well, but it's a lot more work than you'd think. And since gaining weight means losing a job, you can't __eat." She impaled the last bit of her steak on the fork and held it up for inspection. "And I need my three meals a day to keep my sunny disposition." She ate the meat with great pleasure._

"I thought you had a metabolism to take care of that sort of thing?" I said.

"Eh." Diana fumbled for words for a moment, then rolled her eyes self-ironically. "Would you believe it just sort of appeared when I hit thirty? No? Well, there are ways to speed it up a bit, once you know what you're doing. I can't talk about that. Sorry."

"I see," I mumbled. "Ways. Well, go on. I'm assuming that you're not married to him anymore?"

"No." She pouted. "We were married for two years, and then the son of a bitch started cheating on me."

"Shameful," I agreed, thinking that if I had been married to Diana, I wouldn't have strayed for all the world. She might have, though, once she realised how boring I was. But I might have been able to forgive her for that. I would have brutally murdered her lover, but I might have been able to forgive _her for that._

"And would you believe that the girl he cheated on me with wasn't even as sexy as I am?" she said with mock-outrage.

"I don't find that hard to believe at all," I said gravely.

Diana hesitated for a second, then laughed. It felt like a very great thing to make her laugh.

"Thank you," she said. "You're not so bad yourself. But anyway, when I had the nerve to complain, he threw me out. With the clothes on my back and nothing else, I might add. That's what you get for signing prenuptial agreements when you marry for money."

"I'll make a point out of never doing that," I promised solemnly. "Hmm. I think I've heard that name before. Wasn't there a huge scandal around him or something?"

"Yeah, I think so," Diana said innocently.

"Specifically, didn't he get arrested when they found all those pictures of him in, hmm, compromising situations with children?" I said.

"Possibly."

"And if I remember correctly," I said slowly, "that happened pretty soon after when you said he divorced you…"

"Could be," said Diana. She was still trying to look innocent, but the fact that her shoulders were shaking made it somewhat difficult. I gave her a flat gaze. That made her burst into wicked laughter.

"It's not clever to mess with us Empowered people, is it?" I said dryly. "Or, for that matter, anyone else who can get a photography of an event that never, strictly speaking, took place…"

"Nope," Diana said, still laughing. "Not clever at all."

I shook my head. I wasn't sure what I was feeling. Shock, amusement, disgust, admiration, fear… Was this what it all boiled down to? To use whatever skills or resources you had to get anything you wanted? Power without shame? I had bent the rules tonight, moving my reservation. Not everyone would have been allowed to do that, but I had a certain amount of power. And Diana had – apparently – access to a very advanced technology, so she had power, too. More than I had, maybe.

How long would it take until this… personality adjustment… started to eat through my deepest ethical values? I had heard people say that moral decayed a little bit at the time, and I had no reason to doubt that. I felt uneasy.

And at the same time, a part of me was cheering. _Not clever to mess with us Empowered people! Not clever at all!_

Diana's laughter died when she saw the look in my face.

"Okay, I know, I shouldn't have," she said sincerely. "But I was pissed off."

"Remind me never to… make you feel that way," I said dryly. But my lips twitched. It _was kind of funny, in a sick sort of way. Infidelity didn't really warrant a ruined reputation and a long time in prison, but I could see how she had reasoned at the time. __No one treats me like this and gets away with it. I had had thoughts like that a couple of times during the last few days._

Diana tilted her head and gave me an uncertain smile.

"Promise never to do it again?" she said humbly.

I gave off a snort of laughter.

"All right, all right." I winced. "But then you were broke again."

"Then I was broke again," she agreed. "But you have time to learn a thing to two when you're a housewife whose husband can afford to hire people to do the cooking and cleaning. So I, uhm, cheated a bit and got myself a job at a software company. Dull as hell, but it did pay the bills."

I decided not to inquire further into the whole 'cheated a bit' issue. The evening had been very nice so far, and I didn't want to get into a fight. Besides, it could have been worse. It _could have been transferring money from other people's accounts to hers. I had no doubt that Diana could pull that off. Not if she could forge photos of her ex-husband that the best and brightest of the police couldn't see were anything but authentic._

Come to think of it…

"It occurs to me that you're monstrously overqualified to be a secretary," I noted.

Diana grinned modestly.

"Maybe just a little," she agreed.

"And it's not like you couldn't get hired anywhere else," I mused. "So either you're, I don't now, hiding from someone or something, and you just _happen to work with me, or this not-quite-conspiracy of yours placed you with me."_

Diana eyed me, her expression amusedly attentive, but said nothing.

"The way things are going, I don't believe much in coincidences right now," I said.

"And you shouldn't," Diana said peacefully, "but this isn't something I can talk with you about." A smile appeared and disappeared no her lips, like sunlight peeking through the clouds for a brief second. "The others would eat me alive if I did."

I nodded thoughtfully. I didn't like to be shut out like this. I didn't like to be denied information I wanted, and I didn't like the fact that she didn't thrust me. Though that last part was a bit unfair. She had already imparted a lot more information on me than she probably should have. Just a moment ago, I had been bothered by the thought of her breaking the law, so how could I demand that she break the rules of her… society, or whatever it was… just because I told her to?

"When did it happen?" I asked quietly. "For you? When did you get…?" I hesitated to say the word.

"Empowered." She said it for me. "I was seventeen. My parents had just split up. I was living with my mother and her new boyfriend, who was a complete jerk. I felt like no one really cared. I felt… at edge, I suppose. You remember what it was like, being a teenager, right?"

I suppose I must have given her a blank look. She sighed.

"Don't tell me, your parents told you to skip the 'search for identity' nonsense and pay more attention to your homework… Okay, look, _most teenagers are confused, frustrated and feel constantly out of place. Well, multiply that by, oh, fifty thousand or so, and you'll know where I was."_

Actually, she was very perceptive – my parents, along with Patrick, had told me in no uncertain terms what my identity was, and that I should get with the program and stop thinking about such silly things. And so on. My adolescent had been very peaceful. Or empty, depending on how you saw it.

"I think I can understand that," I said slowly.

"Well." She shrugged. "Eventually something just… snapped. I woke up one morning, and everything was just… different. A whole lot of things I had believed in just didn't make sense anymore. And then things started to happen to me. Things that had no business being possible. You know the kind I mean?"

I thought about a monkey-like creature with sharp teeth climbing out through a computer screen.

"Yes, I know."

"I had some friends, by then. People I'd met in chatrooms and stuff. I guess they had been waiting for it to happen to me, so they took me under the shadow of their wings almost immediately." She chuckled. "Such as it was. Basically, they just gave me a few pointers of what I could do, and told me a few things that I under no circumstances was allowed to do, and that was it. Everything else I had to figure out for myself, or trade for."

I didn't say anything. What little hold I had had on this thing had just slipped. I had assumed that Diana had access to science beyond what most people could dream of, but I hadn't been sure how to connect that with the emotional upheaval that she called the Empowering. I had more or less figured it out like this:

Empowered people accepted fewer limits, that much I thought I had gotten out of Diana's none-too-helpful comments and my own situation. They could think outside of the box. That had to make them valuable as scientists, agents of the law, or pretty much anything else that required creative thought and imagination. So it was only logical to assume that the government had some Empowered boys and girls stashed away, working at whatever governments consider to be important. For example, developing fairly extraordinary computer programs and hardware. Patrick was obviously involved. Any federal agency would have been proud to hire someone like him, so obviously one had done so.

But having a free spirit meant being unreliable. Unavoidably, there had been some scientists, agents or whatever who had left their jobs for one reason or another, taking some of those Empowering-related inventions with them. Which was where Diana came in, her and her not-quite-conspiracy. A neat and tidy explanation, I had felt. There were some things that it didn't explain, but it allowed for them to have happened.

Except for the fact that Diana wasn't talking about having_ stolen technology, which was what Patrick had implied that someone had done. She seemed to be saying that she had just picked it up – as if superadvanced science was just floating around for any Empowered to pick up._

_What I could do._

Everything seemed a bit off. Could it really be possible for even an Empowered person to create high-tech devices more or less from scratch? And if it wasn't, what was I to make of all this?

"I've given you more questions than answers, I think," Diana said. There was a hint of compassion in her voice. A very small hint. Mostly, I think she found it amusing to see me squirm. Mind you, I might have agreed that it was a little bit funny, if it hadn't been happening to _me…_

"That seems to be the way of the world lately," I said wryly, which made her laugh again.

"I'm starting to feel pretty unfriendly, saying 'I can't talk about that' all the time," she said. "Can't we talk about you for a while?"

I shrugged.

"There's nothing much to say," I said.

"Oh, come on." She leaned over the table and gave my chest a light push. "Don't be all modest here. I mean, for example, what do you like to do?"

"Working," I said with a touch of bitterness. True, I had a social life of sorts, but that was all about work too. When I went to a party, it wasn't to make friends, it was to get connections. I was good at that, for roughly the same reason I was good at first dates. I had lots of numbers for people I could call up for a favour, but very few for people I could call up for a pleasant chat.

"Liking your work is a fine thing."

"I'm not sure I _do like it," I confessed. "It's just what I was meant to do. I was supposed to have a career. I'm doing pretty well so far."_

Diana winced.

"Now you're depressing me."

"I think I'm depressing myself. I told you I'm a bad topic for conversation."

"I'm not giving up that easily." She leaned forward over the table. Her hair fell around her face in a very attractive fashion. The view I got of her cleavage wasn't exactly unattractive, either. "You have to do something except work and sleep."

"Well…" I tried to think of something I did except those two things. "I like to read, when I've got time."

"Now we're getting somewhere!" Diana said triumphantly, leaning back again. "Okay. I've been known to sit back with a book occasionally. Have you ever read anything by P.G. Wodehouse?"

"No, I don't think you understand." I felt acutely boring. "When I say 'read,' I mean books on physics and chemistry and things like that."

Diana looked at me, an expression of amused disbelief on her face.

"Schoolbooks," she said flatly.

"More or less." I was actually moving up to the university level now. I doubt that I have anything resembling a decent education on the subject, but I do know the basics of How The World Works.

"You read that for _fun?"_

I thought about sitting down in my comfiest armchair, reading about quarks and forces and mixtures and whatnot. It was a pleasant thought.

"Yes," I said simply.

Diana stared at me for a moment longer. Then she started giggling. The giggling turned into chuckling, the chuckling turned into laughing, and before I knew it she sat there _howling with mirth at me. Without being able to help myself, I joined in._

We got some pretty strange looks from elsewhere in the restaurant, but right then, it didn't seem to matter.

"You're surreal," Diana proclaimed when we had regained some control. Her shoulders were still shaking, and tears made her eyes glitter. "You really are."

"I guess so," I agreed peacefully.

"I'm glad our customers don't know this," she said, rolling her eyes. "The director of the publishing department…"

"… fantasy and science fiction division, no less…" I interjected.

"… right, that guy doesn't read fiction. You have no idea what it is you're selling!"

"I've got people whose job it is to read those books," I defended myself. "I trust their judgement."

"Trusting people's judgement?" She shook her head with mock-firmness. "That's dangerous. Here's a piece of advice for you, young one. Assume that everyone but you are idiots, and idiots who think they're smart, at that. It'll get you a long way."

"Is that how I should see you?" I said.

"You might as well. Just in case."

"And is that how you see me?"

"Of course not!" she said immediately. "The very _idea."_

"Why, thank you."

"You _know that you're nowhere near as clever as I."_

In retrospect, I guess I should have seen that one coming…

"Do you know what I just realised?" I said. "There's no one here but us. Wasn't there other people here a moment ago?"

The lighting was a bit sparse, but you could still see that no one was sitting by any of the other tables. There were no waiters either. And hadn't it been a very long time since I heard any cars drive by on the street outside?

I didn't exactly feel surprised. I was a man with a wound on my arm that I had gotten from a killer ape computer program. Such a man adapts a stoical attitude towards things that can't possibly be true. Just because something was impossible, it apparently didn't mean that it couldn't happen.

And it did keep life from getting predictable, I had to admit as much. Besides, this time around I had an expert with me. Diana probably went through things like this on a daily basis. She would take care of it. I decided that I should just hang around for the ride.

Diana slowly looked around, noting the complete absence of other people.

"Oh, _shit!" she said flatly._

I decided that on further consideration, I should probably get a _little worried._

The streets were empty. There were parked cars, but no running ones; the street lights were on, but all windows I saw were dark. It was as if Humanity had suddenly decided to immigrate to Mars and forgotten to tell me and Diana. Our steps sounded unnaturally high in the complete silence as we walked down the street.

I wonder just what might have happened here. Everyone couldn't just have disappeared into thin air. I did not base that assumption on any claims of knowing what was possible and impossible, mind you; I had just noted that there weren't any cars on the streets, and no burning wrecks that had crashed into each other when their drivers vaporised. If there was a power capable of removing every single human being in the city without leaving a trace, would it bother to make them park their cars neatly by the sidewalk first? I rest my case.

Diana was shifting between muttering under her breath and chewing on her lower lip. The expression in her face was hard and focused – very far from her normal easygoingness. I couldn't help wonder just how bad this was, if it got her like this. She was wearing a long, black coat over her dress – she had reclaimed it from the restaurant wardrobe before leaving – and it was flapping around her for every step. She looked menacing. I didn't envy whoever had done this, though I did feel that he had deserved it. Imagine, interrupting my first date in years! Some people had no manners. And before I had even gotten to the dessert…

On the other hand, I had eaten two courses that I hadn't had to pay for. Always look at the bright side, I suppose.

"Where are we going?" I said conversationally.

"To your car," Diana said, softening her expression a bit as she glanced at me. "Hopefully, it'll still be there. I have no idea how thorough he's been."

"Who's 'he?'"

"Good question." Diana smiled faintly. "No idea. Ask me again once we've gotten back home and I've had a chance to twist some arms."

I tried to imagine Diana twisting someone's arm. Somehow, the image didn't feel all that unlikely. There was more to her than showed. Though I suppose I had known that for some time now.

"Do you think it's the guy who sent me that toothy little present?" I asked.

She shrugged.

"Maybe. It could be one of _my enemies, though." She grinned mischievously at me. "You might just have gotten swept along, you poor sucker."_

I felt quite a lot like a poor sucker. So I was Empowered? Well, when was I going to learn how to perform all those tricks? The idea of being able to defend myself was appealing, but what I _really wanted was to know how it was done. I've always been the kind to want to know in what sleeve the conjurer actually hid that card. That's supposed to ruin the experience, but I've always cared very little for illusions and very much for the ways and means to create them. Now, I had walked into a world where the tricks __weren't illusions – and I was more eager than ever to learn how they were done._

Of course, I could always try my resident know-it-all, despite knowing fully well that she probably wasn't going to be very informative…

"Are you going to tell me what has happened to everyone?" I asked timidly.

"We've been relocalised a minor distance on the existential axis," Diana said immediately. "No further than a microturing or two, but enough to move us out of Primary and into Secondary."

I gave her a flat glance.

"To put it in layman's terms," she added innocently, "nothing has happened to everyone else, it's we who're in another dimension."

I considered that for a moment. I patiently listened to my mind screaming 'Impossible!' until it tired. Then I nodded soberly.

"All right," I said.

She looked at me with hint of amusement.

"You're coping pretty well with this."

"Thank you. So are you."

"Yes, but I'm used to it."

"Uh-huh. People push you into Secondary a lot, then?"

"All right, maybe not, but it's happened before." She frowned. "Once, anyway."

"You apparently got out," I noted.

"Oh, yes."

"How?"

"Eh." She stopped walking and turned towards me, making an apologetic grimace. "I ran across a guy who, unlike me, knew how to get out of here, and who could be bribed into taking me along for the ride?"

I realised that things were about to get a little awkward. If Diana had learned how to leave this place on her own, she would have told me by now, if only to show off. Since she hadn't, she still didn't know – and there seemed to be a certain shortage of interdimensional travellers. Other than us, that was.

"I see," I said. "Do you have any kind of plan?"

"I always have a plan." She folded her arms over her chest. "Right now, it's to get back to the Secondary version of my apartment and see if the Secondary versions of the gadgets I keep there are still usable. They should be, in theory."

I noticed that 'in theory,' but decided not to comment it. There was no harm in trying, at least. Otherwise, we would just have to come up with some other way to leave. Being the last man on Earth didn't sound so bad if Diana was to be the last woman, but I still didn't want to spend the rest of my life trapped one microturing (whatever that was) from reality. This place seemed abandoned and bleak, and far less interesting than the real world.

"And then you can take us home?" I said.

"Well… no." She let her arms drop to her sides. "But I might be able to signal someone who can."

I shrugged.

"Let's give it a shot, then."

We started walking again.

"At least we're not in that much of a hurry," I mused. "If everything else is still here, there should be possible to find food."

"It is," Diana said absently. "Though you don't really need to eat here. And that's just one of the rules that don't apply."

Indeed? File that one away for later. I wondered if it might be possible to transport people from famished Third World nations here, and letting them wait for the weather to start co-operating enough again for there to be a decent harvest. Heaven knew that there was room enough for any number of people here.

"Well, good," I said. "And if we're the only ones here, it's not like there's anyone who'll hurt us."

Diana said nothing. I thought she said nothing with a bit too much force.

"There _is something here that can hurt us," I said. It wasn't a question._

"Well, I didn't want to alarm you," she said. "But yes, this place isn't as empty as it looks. It's got… inhabitants. Most of them will just ignore us. Some of the others will be afraid to attack two… Empowered ones, so they'll stay away."

The pause was brief, but I heard it. She had meant to use some other phrase to describe us, then caught herself in time. More secrets. The thought gave me only the slightest of anger – mostly, I felt eager to get all those secrets out into the light, one way or another. Diana's duty to keep me in the dark had been failed several times already. I would make her fail it even more, when the opportunity presented itself.

"And the _rest of the others?"_

"Uhm. Will attack us on sight, actually."

Suddenly the windows overlooking the street seemed darker and deeper, like watchful eyes. I sighed.

"Wonderful."

She patted me on the back.

"Take it easy. We'll be out of here before any of them catches sight of us. And even if they find us, I might be able to deal with a lot of them. There's a _reason why the lesser ones are scared of people like us."_

I didn't feel very scary, but I had a feeling that she was just being polite by adding me to her own category. If I had been a hostile dweller of Secondary, I would have thought twice about attacking her. To say that she moved like a tiger would be exaggerating; Diana was no more agile or graceful than any other woman. But she moved as if she _thought she was a tiger. Her entire body language screamed with self-confidence. And she certainly had some power, at least when given access to her machines and programs; Henry Silverberg could testify to as much. Perhaps she had some without them, too._

I didn't feel _that weird being under the protection of a woman who was half a foot shorter than I and at least thirty pounds lighter, because sexism was another thing that my upbringing had made sure to eliminate. There was a trace of shame in me, though – an unpleasant feeling of being hopelessly inferior. Diana had been Empowered when she was seventeen. I had been Empowered when I was thirty-three. What did that say about inner talents?_

"Let's just hope that we don't run into a furball," she added as an afterthought.

"A furball," I said tiredly. This was going to be a long night…

"Yeah. They think that Secondary is their personal property, and the rest of us should just make ourselves scarce."

"That's what we're trying to do," I pointed out.

"Furballs don't exactly have a reputation for listening to reason."

We reached my car, which stood peacefully enough in the parking lot where I had put it. Whoever 'he' was, either his imagination or his power had been too limited to do something about it.

'He.' That was an interesting riddle in itself. 'He' had pushed us out of Primary and into Secondary. Obviously 'he' had done so because 'he' wanted us either dead or out of the way for an extended period of time. But that seemed like overkill. If 'he' had access to that impressive technology, why not just fire a rocket-launcher at the restaurant or something? Why this elaborate, overly complicated attack? Especially since Diana very obviously could take care of herself. She had fled from Secondary before. It was very possible that she could do it again.

Would she be able to take me with her, though? _That was something she hadn't proven herself capable of._

Theory: someone wanted me dead. That someone had threatened me through my computer, and finally sent some sort of killing-machine after me. But I had survived that. And from now on, I would be wary of that sort of tactic. So he had put some other piece of high-tech to use. This one transported all Empowered individuals within a certain area into Secondary. Never mind how or why. The Empowered were different – it was theoretically possible, therefore, that something that affected them would not affect an ordinary person.

He could have waited, though. He could have made sure I was the only Empowered one within the target area, and sent me here confused and defenceless. But he hadn't. Instead, he had attacked as soon as he could get his weapon into working order, relying on Diana's presumed inability to take care of me in this place.

So he was in a hurry.

Or he was too scared of me to think straight.

I almost laughed at _that thought. Scared of me? I was blundering around without a clue – I wasn't a threat to __anyone. Still, who knew how this guy's mind worked? If I had been a murderer, lurking in the shadows and armed with unbelievable super-technology, __I wouldn't have been afraid of me – but then, I wouldn't have become a murderer in the first place. This guy was not sane in any orthodox term of the word. Maybe he thought I was the antichrist. How should __I know?_

I tried to unlock the car door. Then a hand lashed out from underneath the car and grabbed my ankle.

I neither screamed like a girl nor wet my pants. But that was due to, pardon me for blowing my own horn, very impressive self-control. I most certainly _wanted to do both at that moment._

Instead, I gasped and tore at my foot. It came loose so easily that I fell flat on my back, the rest of the ankle-grabber being pulled from out of its hiding-place and into the lighted street. I looked at it, wide-eyed, as I tried to regain my bearing. It was about as big as a five-year-old child, human in general form and completely unhuman in detail. Its skin was yellow, not like an autumn leaf but like a yellow crayon – a flashy, striking, _artificial kind of yellow. Orange veins swelled all over its skinny body. It slouched as it sat between my feet, its disproportionably large head bent down between its sharp shoulders. The mouth was filled with sharp teeth._

"Mortal, mortal, mortal," it sang. The voice didn't fit its appearance; it was the cute, innocent voice of a little girl. "Mortal for food, mortal for tool, mortal for me."

"Back off, Maurin."

Diana appeared in my field of vision, standing over the creature. From somewhere, she had taken a slender knife. She held it casually, but it lay comfortably in her hand. Maurin hissed like an angry cat, his long-fingered hands scratching nervously at the pavement.

"Mine!" he whined stubbornly. "My land. My prey. Go away. Don't like you."

"You'd like me even less if I spread your guts all over the street."

As I took the opportunity to crawl backwards out of Maurin's reach, I mused that I probably wouldn't have hired Diana in the first place, had I had known that she could say things like 'spread your guts all over the street' while keeping a straight face. She sounded vicious. And completely serious, one might add.

"My land," Maurin insisted.

"Perhaps. But we're not here by choice. And we'll be out of here before you know it if you just back off now."

I quietly got to my feet and circled around Maurin as discreetly as I could, ending up behind Diana. Hey, she was the one with the knife!

Maurin seemed uncertain, as far as I could determine from watching facial features that were almost completely unhuman. Diana's fearlessness disturbed him. Hell, it disturbed me too. But I also felt a bit of stunned awe. _God, what a woman!_

"Tribute!" he spat. "You give tribute! Or no leave!"

Diana bit her lip, glaring at Maurin. Her eyes narrowed, as if she was calculating how dangerous he would be if it came to a fight. Personally, I thought he _looked pretty damn dangerous. He wasn't that big, but he had a large mouth filled with sharp teeth and long arms with – I knew from experience – very strong, long-fingered hands. His skinny limbs looked like they were full of sinewy musculature._

"Okay," Diana finally said. "What do you want?"

"A mortal heart, dripping with blood!"

"We've only got one each, and we're not finished with them yet."

While I hated to be rude enough to interrupt, I felt that this was the time for those two to impart some information on me. Considering that the discussion had come to involve my blood-dripping heart, I should be entitled to some enlightenment.

"Diana, would you care to introduce us?" I said dryly.

She didn't take her eyes of Maurin (sensibly enough, I suppose) but answered anyway.

"Sure. Maurin, this is Simon Stromberg. He's like me, so don't screw with him. Simon, this is Maurin. He lives here. We met last time I was here, and he wasn't any more polite then." She smirked. "Or any more refined. Hiding under cars! What are you, a boogieman? Why not just go _completely cliché and hide under __beds?"_

Maurin opened his substantial mouth and hissed. There were two snake-like tongues in there, twisting around each other in a most distasteful way.

"You touched a very important point there," I noted. "What _is he?"_

"Ugly," Diana said with a shrug.

"Ferazoid!" Maurin yelled. "I'm a Ferazoid! Stronger than mortal! Smarter than mortal! Better than mortal!"

"Yeah, right," Diana said. "Anyway, I'm not really sure what a Ferazoid _is, except that they're pretty angry and hungry. Secondary isn't exactly my area of expertise."_

"_Tribute!" Maurin screeched._

"All right, all right!" Diana said. "How about my firstborn child?"

"No!" Maurin said sulkily.

"Come no, why not? It's classical."

"Wouldn't have said it," Maurin said. "Wouldn't have said it, if you wanted any."

I had to agree with him there. The kind of woman who offers her firstborn to a Ferazoid is also the kind of woman who is not that eager to become a mother. And if she does become one, someone ought to call child services, because with that attitude she's not likely to be very good at raising her children. Diana had apparently no plans of having kids, and had meant to use that to get out of this without ever paying anything. You couldn't very well give up your firstborn if you never gave birth, could you?

But her trick might have worked, if she had delivered it differently. She shouldn't just have blurted the offer out, she should have allowed herself to be talked into accepting it, appearing to make a desperate bargain to save her life. But then, she wasn't that good at deception, was she? No matter how much her unwillingness to speak about all matters Empowered annoyed me, she _had given away far more than she should have._

Diana cursed under her breath.

"All right," she said, "how about…"

"Wait," I said. "Would you mind terribly much if I took over here?"

She gave me a quick glance before she went back to watching Maurin. She looked doubtful.

"Much as I hate to offend your pride," she said slowly, "you're not exactly an authority at this."

"True." I nodded. "But you don't know much about Ferazoids anyway. I don't know _anything about them, but I know a lot about negotiating."_

Diana hesitated for a moment, then shrugged.

"Okay, you're on."

And so, I found myself in a position where I had to bargain with a multi-tongued, evil-minded, half-human creature for my and Diana's safe passage through a certain area of the parallel dimension known as Secondary.

Life was certainly more interesting these days.

"All right then, Mr. Maurin," I said, trying to make my tone into an exact copy of the one I used with my various business associates. "As you may have understood, we feel that we are forced to reject your offered price of one human heart."

I was sitting on the hood of the car, my hands resting on my tights. _I have done this before, I told myself. __This is a deal that needs to be made, and I am expected to make it as profitable as possible for myself and those – all right, all right, the one __– who I represent. Never mind the environment or the exact conditions; the core of the matter never __changes._

_I hope._

"I'm sure that you can understand our reasons here," I went on. "In order to obtain the requested price, one of us would be forced to kill the other. So in practice, you would only be able to guarantee the safety of _one of us, which makes the comparably high price all the more unfair."_

Diana was standing in front of me to the right, still with the knife drawn and ready. It felt rather warming to be protected. Conspiracies aside, she cared enough about me to want to keep Maurin's teeth away from my throat. I had to remember that. Someone's objective was to kill me, and at least _part of Diana's objective was to keep me alive. I could trust her to do that much, if nothing else._

Maurin was sitting on his haunches right in front of me, maybe three strides away. His round little eyes looked at me with stubborn menace. He hated the fact that he didn't quite dare to attack Diana, and because I was with her, he hated me too. Anger and uncertainty; not a combination you liked to see in the party you were negotiating with. Maurin just needed a little push to do something rash – and that might get me or Diana hurt, or killed. That knife didn't look like a very impressive weapon when faced against Maurin's spindly, sinewy form. If he could only grab her wrist with one of those long-fingered hands, the battle would be over right there and then.

I realised with some distress that what was mainly keeping Maurin back was that he didn't know how dangerous _I was. I'm tall and broad-shouldered and look like I can do well in a fight – Maurin wasn't to know that the very thought of violence terrifies me. And Diana had said that I was Empowered, which was true, but Maurin probably thought that I could pull a laser-gun or something out of a pocket and blast him to shreds. If he understood how helpless I was, he might take his chances against Diana – which could very possibly lead to both of us dying here and being eaten by a monster. I had better look as dangerous as I could._

"We're willing," I said, "to promise you a total of five hearts from larger mammals, to be delivered here with a week, plus one extra heart as interest for the delay, giving a totality of six. The exact nature of the mammals can be negotiated, so if you're for example particularly fond of the idea of black goats or similar…"

Maurin spat on the street. The pavement started bubbling and hissing as whatever he had in his mouth ate right through it.

"Noooooooo! Human! _Human heart!" he howled. "Human, human, human!"_

"I withdraw that offer, and I apologise if it offended you," I said stiffly. I had thought I was being rather reasonable. How _did you go about finding raw hearts in this city, anyway? I had assumed that I could find that out once I got out of here. A butcher would know, presumably. And I had enough money that most butchers would be willing to accept a somewhat unorthodox taste in meat… "However, as I have already mentioned, that particular currency is not up for debate. Instead, let us investigate alternative modes of payment. What might you require that we have a reasonable chance at obtaining without harming ourselves or others?"_

"Nothing!" Maurin snapped. "Want a _heart! Want it __now!"_

I assumed the most patient expression in my repertoire.

"Mr. Maurin, may I bring to your attention that you are outnumbered two to one, and that we are both Empowered?" I said. "If you proceed in being unreasonable, you will leave us no alternative but to gamble everything on a display of brute force. That will serve neither of our purposes."

Maurin glanced at Diana. She smiled sweetly at him.

"You techies?" Maurin said gruffly.

I had no idea what he meant. Apparently, Diana did.

"I'm a technomancer, yes," she said.

A what?

"Your soul!" Maurin looked like he was gloating, if human emotions could even be applied to his bestial face. "Your soul on a disc!"

I leaned over to Diana's ear.

"What does he mean?" I whispered.

"He wants a transcription of the electromagnetic field around my body," she mumbled back. "A copy of my aura, as it were. A copy of my soul, engraved on a microchip."

I wasn't familiar with the technique she was referring to, or its implications, but I still didn't like the sound of that. There were probably lots of unpleasant things that could be done to someone you had that kind of information about.

"Is it risky to give that to him?" I said.

"Yeah. But he won't accept anything from us that's _not risky for us to give. If you think that's the best offer you'll get, take it."_

"Well, we're not giving him your soul on a microchip!" I said firmly. "That'll be my soul, in that case."

She snorted. Most of my attention was aimed at Maurin at the time, but I got the impression that she grimaced.

"Simon, this is _not the time to go knight-in-shining-armour on me!"_

"I'm not," I said. "It's just that I'm the one bargaining, so I'm the one paying. It's only fair."

She gave off a doubtful, grunting noise, but left it at that.

"On balance," I said loftily to Maurin, "I believe that we will be more inclined to offer you a tissue sample of some kind. The heart is of course out of the question, but I might be persuaded to give you, say, a finger or two. While this is of course…"

"Yes!" Maurin said immediately. "Flesh! Gimme _flesh! Deal! Deal!"_

I realised that I had made a fool out of myself, and now all that was left was to figure out how. Maurin had virtually _jumped at the offer, and I didn't think it was because he was so desperate for a snack that he got delirious from the thought of gnawing the meat off of a few bony fingers. I had claimed expertise here, but the truth was that I was fumbling in the dark._

My confident businessman's expression died away, being replaced by confusion, uncertainty and growing fear. Had I just made the greatest mistake of my life?

"He'll extract the DNA from whatever you give him," Diana mumbled. "That's even worse than a copy of your soul. There are things around here that can do _anything to you if they get their hands on your DNA code."_

The resignation in her voice was worse than the words themselves. I had tried to prove myself, and I had failed. She might not hold it against me, but I held it against myself. I had been brought up to be a team player, and this was the same as letting the team down.

"Deal's made!" Maurin growled, shaking an impossibly long finger at me. "No backing! No backing out! Deal's _made! Flesh for passage!"_

If I tried to go back on my word now, he would probably attack. He was positively drooling at the thought of getting a part of my body, and if I deprived him of that, he would go for Diana's throat and try to get _all of __both of us. I might have screwed up, but I wouldn't let it go __that far. Not even if it meant giving monsters from another dimension power over me._

I suddenly felt tired enough to drop. Bitter defeat washed over me. Diana would have handled it better than this, at least. But I had just _had to play at being an Empowered one, a man of action. Empowered? Not bloody likely. I was just Patrick's puppet, capable only of giving him partial control of a company. Everything else was self-delusion. I had spent my life dreaming that I was being successful, and now I had woken up and realised that there was a whole miraculous, terrible world out there, and in it I counted for exactly nothing._

"Flesh!" Maurin snarled.

_Nothing, I thought again._

And then I voice appeared in my mind, tearing through my self-pity. I recognised it. It was the one I sometimes had inner conversations with; the part of me that I had created to question everything I thought. And what it said now was: _Like hell__ I'm nothing!_

And somewhere, I found my relaxed smile again. It settled on my face as if it had never been gone.

"I'm glad we could come to an agreement, Mr. Maurin," I said. "Now tell me, is any part of me acceptable, or does it have to be a finger? The reason why I am asking is that if it is all the same to you, there are certain members and organs that are more valuable to me than others. For instance, I would rather give a toe than a finger, and rather than giving up a toe I would happily donate my appendix. So, am I free to choose, or will the currency necessarily be fingers?"

Maurin hesitated. Despite his inhuman features, his confusion was obvious. He had been winning a few moments ago. He had known it; he had seen it on my face, and on Diana's. Nothing had changed since then, so why wasn't I acting like I as defeated anymore?

_Because I haven't lost until I say so, friend, I thought._

"Any!" he said impatiently. "Any part! Any flesh!"

"Well then." I nodded courteously. "It will then be my pleasure to pay, for my and my friend's safe passage through your territory, the both of my eyes."

There was a shocked silence. I felt rather proud of having surprised both Maurin and Diana. Both of them had seen things I could only imagine, but I had still done something neither of them had expected. That felt good. I wasn't nothing. I might be a fool, but I wasn't nothing.

I was gambling quite a lot here, betting on Maurin being just smart enough to proceed, and just dumb enough to proceed right into the trap I had placed in front of him. But I wasn't too worried about that. Businessmen, politicians, yellow-skinned creatures from other dimensions; I had made a living partly out of being able to tell how clever they were. And I was confident that Maurin would do _just what I wanted him to._

And the risk in itself gave me a rush. I was gambling a lot, yes, but I had had enough of playing it safe anyway. At that moment, I actually felt rather Empowered.

"Simon, have you gone fucking _nuts?" Diana gasped._

"As you may recall," I rebuked her gently, "you authorised me to both negotiate a price and pay it. Now please let me do so."

She mutely shook her head. I had never seen Diana dumbstruck, but this was pretty close.

"Why eyes?" Maurin demanded. "You'll be blind! Can give me anything! Why eyes?"

"Surely that is my business and not yours?" I said, raising an eyebrow.

"You… don't need eyes?" Maurin hazarded. He sounded wary, as if he felt that he was stepping out of rhetoric thin ice. "Got some techie thing to see for you!"

"Well, really, Mr. Maurin, the information of just which devices and techniques I have access to was _not part of our bargain," I said. "Now, if you would be so kind as to remove my eyeballs with a minimum of pain on my part…"_

That only made him more eager. He didn't like being denied anything, which I had already had opportunity to notice. If there was something I was trying to keep away from him, then that was what he was interested in.

"Show me!" he demanded. "Wanna see techie thing!"

"I am not at liberty to reveal…"

"_Show me!"_

I took my cell-phone out of my coat pocket and showed it to him. He made a grab for it, but I held it up above his reach. Diana took a warning step towards him, and he retreated with a hiss.

"Want!" he said.

"Well, our bargain grants you the right to my eyes," I reminded him. "Equipment for whom I am responsible is quite another story. My colleagues will not be at all pleased if they find out that I can not be entrusted with experimental, classified devices."

Maurin grinned cunningly.

"_Change deal!" he gloated. I did my best to look shocked._

"This is a direct violation of…"

"_Change!" he yelled. "Gimme techie seeing-thing! Want that! Not eyes! Gimme! Gimmegimme__gimme!"_

"My associates will be _most dissatisfied with me," I said darkly. Maurin paused._

"Might give you more?" he offered temptingly. "Might tell you about the werewolf."

_The what? I thought, but managed to maintain my poker face. I remained silent for a moment like I was considering the offer, then nodded shortly._

"Tell me," I said.

"Hee." Maurin smirked. "Angry werewolf. Angry, angry, angry. Says no one else can come here. He can't find me, no, no, no, but he can find you if you stay. Tear you to pieces, he will. Soon." He reached out a hand and shook it angrily, palm up. "Now gimme!"

I threw him the cell-phone. He caught it skilfully and ran across the street, into a doorway, snickering all the way.

Silence reigned the street for a moment after he had gone.

"You," Diana said then, in a tone that suggested she could not believe what she was saying, "just tricked a Ferazoid into giving us safe passage _and a titbit of information in return for a yuppie toy."_

"I told you I was good at negotiation," I said, trying to sound as if I wasn't basking in her appreciation. I _had done rather well, hadn't I? I felt that I had earned a bit of smugness._

"Yeah. I guess you did." She grinned and put her hand on my chest. I felt like it burned me straight through my shirt. And the heat was spreading all over my body. "I guess you did. There's more to you than it seems, Simon."

"Thank you," I said. I wasn't sure what else I _could say. "I might same the same to you."_

"Me? Nah." She laughed and walked around the car. I resisted the urge to touch the place on my chest where her warm, smooth hand had rested for a moment. "What you see is what you get. Now let's get the hell out of here before Maurin smartens up and realises that he _didn't get some sort of ground-breaking technomantic device for his troubles."_

I saw her point. I quickly unlocked the doors and sat down in the driver's seat. I felt a bit nervous about trying to engine, but it started up just like in the normal world. The fact that I could still rely on the laws of combustion gave me a bit of confidence. _Some of the rules still applied, at least._

"Maurin said 'werewolf,'" I said as we left the parking space and drove towards whatever version of Diana's apartment existed in Secondary. "He meant a furball, didn't he? There's an angry furball loose around here."

"Seems that way," Diana said.

"How dangerous did you say they were, again?"

Diana grinned wryly.

"Let's put it this way; if a furball sees us, we're dead. If a furball _smells us, we're dead. If a furball manages to get hold of Maurin and make him tell it about tonight, we're dead. If a furball…"_

"Thank you," I said quickly. "I think I get the overall picture here…"


	4. Revelations

_Insert standard disclaimer._

_Oh,__ and there is a whole lot of new information given in this chapter. Tell me if you think I'm trying to cram the reader's head with too much at once, will you?_

Diana's house had changed.

It had been a rather unremarkable apartment building at the edges of town. The facade had been pleasantly but unimaginatively white, and there had been a small, well-kept lawn surrounding it. It had been three stories high, and had balconies with an eclectic but not unpleasant display of flowers on them.

It was still three stories high, or thereabouts. The rest was... different.

It looked like the mad scientist villain's stronghold in a cartoon, all steel and wires and strange electrical sparks that ran down along the walls and earthed themselves in the ground. Hordes of video cameras glared out from it, turning to follow the car's movement as I parked it a careful distance away from the high-tech monstrosity. Most of the yard was covered with antennas of every size and variety. The moved faintly back and forth, like grass touched by a gentle breeze.

I glanced at Diana, who was studying the house with something that resembled amused interest. That did nothing to encourage me. I would have preferred it if she had been just a little freaked out, so that I would have had a reason to stay strong. Now she was staying strong, and I felt that I was beginning to freak out. Damn.

"Love what you've done with the place," I said dryly, trying to put some emotional distance between myself and a house-sized machine that looked a bit like it was sentient - or at least aware - and a lot like it didn't much like intruders.

"It _is_ kind of cool, isn't it?" she said. I wasn't sure if she was deliberately misinterpreting my comment, or if she just couldn't imagine that anyone would not appreciate the sight of this kind of technology in action. All right, I had to admit that the house was rather interesting, but I would have been a lot more interested if I had been sure that it wouldn't try to eat me.

"So what is it?" I said. "Another one of 'his' traps?"

"I'm not sure, actually," Diana said. She opened the door and stepped out of the car. I unbuckled my seatbelt and did the same. She, of course, had neglected to put on hers. I suppose that if you're involved in shadowy conspiracies involving science fiction technology and a semi-religious belief in superhuman 'Empowered ones', chances are you will die of something else than a car crash. Especially if the car you're in is the only thing on the street that's moving. "Might be, I suppose. On the other hand, it might just be a reflection of the stuff that goes on here."

"Like what?" I said, eyeing the house suspiciously. It eyed me right back. With a lot more eyes than I had access to.

"Well, I suppose you could call them experiments," she said with a shrug. "I don't really like taking people's word for it, so whenever I learn something new, I always have to try it out."

I remembered what I had seen of Diana's apartment earlier that night, with strange, half-dismantled devices and gleaming microchips all over the place. 'Experiments', I guessed, was the polite term. 'Tinkering' might come closer. Of course, she hadn't blown herself up yet, so perhaps she knew what she was doing.

"And some of those experiments deal with Secondary?" I asked.

"Not really. I'm more into meddling with people than meddling with dimensions." She grinned at me. "But Secondary is impressionable. Things leak through from our world."

I shook my head, not to deny what she said, but just because I was feeling so confused. The explanation, I couldn't help it notice, lacked a lot in the common sense department. Of course, so did this whole situation, but I still felt that the remark about Secondary being 'impressionable' didn't quite fit in. The shape Diana's house had in this world seemed more like a metaphor to me than anything else, and metaphors was something people cared about, not something the universe cared about. The only way this could be true would be if...

I felt a thought enter my head, a thought that was so large that encompassing it was almost physically painful.

If the universe... cared what... people thought?

I shook my head again, more firmly this time, and frowned. No. Ridiculous. That was a childish fantasy. The cold, hard reality was that the universe was completely indifferent to the little scraps of life that it contained. We populated the world with concepts like good and evil, with ghosts and gods, with greatness and glory - and time and again, physical reality turned its back to us and showed us just how little those things mattered.

So why was there a part of me who was cheering, as if I had had an important revelations? Why was there a voice roaring a _YES!_ Why did the thought about human thoughts influencing the universe feel so... so true?

_Because it's an appealing notion, _I told myself. _Because that's what we all _want _to believe. That doesn't make it true._

And yet, part of me - the voice of Empowering, I supposed - was telling me that I could give an order, and by God the universe had better obey it. How could it deny me? How could dead, cold laws of nature challenge the authority of a living will?

I noticed that Diana was holding her hand over her mouth, apparently covering a large grin.

"What?" I said, a little testily. I felt confused and uncertain and in no mood to be made fun of.

"Nothing," she said merrily. "It just looked like you just realised something important."

"No." I frowned. "I just think that I'm starting to develop a bit of hubris."

"Ah." She smiled knowingly. "That's always been a problem for people like us. You have to find your balance there. Too little self-confidence and you might as well still be a Sleeper. Too much, and you'll eventually try to do something bloody stupid because you can't see how you can possibly fail."

I opened my mouth to ask what a Sleeper was, but then I found the answer for myself. She had said that another name for the Empowering was 'the Awakening'. If you weren't Awakened, you were a Sleeper. Logical. So instead I said:

"Yeah. For a moment there, I really did think I could do something impossible."

She shook her head, still smiling.

"Nothing is _impossible_, Simon. Some things are just _bloody stupid_, that's all. How about we see if we can get into my place without getting brutally massacred?"

She didn't wait for my answer but started to walk towards the door with long strides, her coat flapping behind her. I swallowed a few choice curses and followed quickly.

There was a narrow path between the forest of antennas, and Diana started walking down it. The spear of metal and plastic gracefully bent out of her way, like devoted subjects bowing to their queen as she passed. I hesitated at the beginning of the path, then took a deep breath and started walking down it.

I was allowed to take only a few steps. Then the rods and tendrils that had allowed Diana to pass so gracefully closed around me, stopping me from going forward and blocking my retreat at the same time. I had never before contemplated just how menacing the ordinary antenna looked. Or at least how menacing they looked in numbers. They seemed inhuman, insectoid. And they had captured me.

I stood as frozen for a few seconds, until I realised that they weren't making any more threatening moves. I laughed, quietly and hoarsely. They were just _antennas_, for crying out loud! It wasn't as if they were doomsday weapons! If they were feeling inhospitable, well, then that was too bad, because I was going in. I just had to be firm here.

I grabbed hold of two sets of antennas in front of me and started bending them out of my way.

Growing up, I had had an old aunt who lived in the countryside, and my parents had taken me to see her a few times. I had found it all pretty boring. The grown-ups' chatter didn't interest me, and there was nothing in her house to play with. I had passed the time by going out and exploring the surroundings.

There had been a field nearby, where a local farmer had his cows. It was surrounded by an electric fence. The first time I came there, I had tried to climb over it. I was too young to know what a buzzing, trembling wire was, other than yet another strange thing that I had to investigate.

It didn't exactly _hurt_. Not at the time, anyway. My hand stung a bit afterwards, and my chest ached, but when I put my hand on the wire, it wasn't really pain that caused me to scream and stumble backwards. What I remember most vividly was the sense of a _quiver_ deep in my being, as if my soul was being shaken loose from my body.

This was like that, only magnified about a thousand times. My own scream seemed distant, as did the sensation of falling. Then I dropped to the ground, and _that_ felt real enough. I lay there panting, while the antennas rustled and clinked around me. _Just try that again,_ it sounded like they were saying. _Just try that again, and see what happens._

My whole body ached. My breath came in quick, shallow wheezes. I stared in front of me without seeing. I felt somehow violated, as if some unpleasant entity - a bigger, badder version of Maurin, perhaps - had reached into me and touched something very intimate.

The antennas quickly fell out of the way as Diana hurried back. They were the very image of obedience when she was involved. The mistress wanted to pass. That was perfectly within the mistress' right. It was nasty intruders like me who had to be stopped. For a second, I hated them all deeply.

"Oh my God, Simon!" Diana gasped. For once, her normal expression of amused detachment was gone. She looked heart-warmingly concerned. "I'm so sorry! I had no idea they were going to do that!"

"I'm okay..." I said weakly. "I'm okay... I just feel a bit... tired right now..."

She knelt by me and hugged violently. Even in my current state, I couldn't help noticing that this action meant that a great deal of bosom was being pressed against me. It wasn't worth being electrocuted for, but it came pretty close.

"Fucking psycho machines!" she growled. "They're probably supposed to symbolize my fear of intimacy or something. Well, I'm not going to stand for this! Can you walk?"

"Sure," I mumbled and tried to get to my feet. It didn't work. My muscles felt like cooked noodles. All I managed was to look pathetic. Diana sighed.

"Okay, don't worry about it. We'll just have to do it the other way."

She closed her eyes and started breathing deeply. Each breath was quicker than the last, and before long, her whole body was shaking with them. I wondered if she was throwing some kind of fit. Diana didn't exactly strike me as the fit-throwing kind, but...

Then she suddenly gave off a roar and grabbed hold of me. In the same motion, she got to her feet, so that she ended up with me held on straight arms over her head. She grunted with effort, and then started walking down the path again. The antennas cleared the way for her again, thought a bit more reluctantly this time. It seemed to me that they were wondering if the mistress knew what the hell she was doing.

I calmly analysed the situation. I weighed maybe two hundred pounds, or perhaps even more. Diana had a sturdy built, but it didn't really seem possible for her to lift that much, especially not in the way she did. And yet, there you had it. Curious.

She put me down just outside of the door, out of reach for the antennas. The door, by the way, looked more like something you found on a bank vault than outside of an apartment building. I just thought that I should mention that, though at this point, that was really not enough to surprise me.

"Remind me to be more polite to you in the future," I said. I tried flexing a few muscles. It worked somewhat better than the last time, though they very clearly managed to transmit the message that they would much rather be allowed to rest for a while. I ignored their pleads and kept trying. I refused to be such a wimp in front of Diana.

She smiled.

"You're polite enough. On the other hand, aren't I due for a raise soon?"

"Very soon," I agreed. "I don't suppose you'd care to tell me how you just did that?"

She shrugged.

"I've got microchips installed in pretty much every gland in my body. All I had to do was to order them to bring on lots and lots of adrenalin." She grinned. "I can also decide how much of what I eat turn to energy, and how much turn into fat reserves. Hence the metabolism. So there you have two answers for the price of one."

"Handy," I said. I made an effort and got up to my knees. I could use a microchip or two myself right now.

"Yeah." Diana absently stroked a few loose strands of hair out of her face. "But the problem with doing something like what I just did is that there's hell to pay afterwards. I've just upsetted all sorts of chemical balances in my body, and once all that adrenalin wears out, I'll start feeling the effects of that. So it would be really good if we could get in within five minutes or so, because after that I'll probably collapse. I just thought I should tell you that."

"Noted," I mumbled and got to my feet. I had to lean pretty heavily on the metal fence lining the stairs up to the door to do it, but I did it. I was pretty resilient, despite having no cybernetic enhancements.

Cybernetic. That was the word, wasn't it? And that meant that I was together with an honest-to-goodness cyborg. I considered my feelings about that, and found that I actually thought that it was pretty cool. Other people read about them, but I was dating one.

I studied the door. There didn't seem to be any handle, or even a lock. It was just a rectangular piece of metal, blocking the way. Presumably there were hinges somewhere around here, but they were hidden and protected. If this had been constructed by anyone, then he knew his business - that business being to bar the way of anyone trying to enter.

"Open," Diana said.

The door remained closed. She took a deep breath.

"I said _open_!" she roared.

No effect.

"Now what?" she said wearily. "I'm allowed this far but no further? Where's the sense in that?"

"Maybe something more is required here," I suggested. "A password or something."

She shook her head.

"It's never as easy as that. If it was like that, anyone could enter if they just had access to the right information. No, I have to do something to get in." She banged her hand against the door. "I know what this is. It's just the same allegory, put in another way. I don't let anyone in, so now this door won't let _me _in. Damn it, I don't have _time _for this!" She glared at the door like it had personally insulted her. It was too bad that it wasn't wooden, because if it had been, I thought it might have burst into flame from being looked at in that way.

"Okay, but we got through the first allegory," I pointed out. "So there has to be a way through this one, too. Are you sure it's a symbol? It's not just a case of a big bloody door that's supposed to lock us out?"

"It never is," she said. "Not around here. No, this part of Secondary has absorbed parts of my personality."

"Well, then we have an advantage," I pointed out. "Because you know all about your personality. You just have to figure out how to translate it into the right symbolic language."

"No more than that, huh?" she sighed. "Damn, how I hate all this mystical stuff. I like programming code. Programming code is simple. Programming code is _logical_."

My own opinions on mystical stuff were divided. On one hand, it was certainly a nice change from balance reports. On the other hand, it was a pretty tiresome thing to have to deal with right now, with the both of us ready to faint from exhaustion.

"To start with the basics," I said, "why _do _you have issues with intimacy?"

She folded her arms over her chest.

"I prefer to be seen like the person I want to be, not the person I really am."

"Is the difference that great, then?" I said.

"In most cases, no. But sometimes it is. I don't see why I should go around putting my failings on display. What I feel is my business."

"Agreed," I said. "But right now, there's a very good reason to put your failings on display, because I don't think we'll get through that door until you do."

She gave me a dark look.

"And rumour has it there's a furball in the area," I said, smiling innocently. "You know, one of those things that must not under any circumstances find us out in the open, or..."

"Okay, okay, okay!" She frowned. "What exactly is it you think I should do?"

I glanced at the door.

"Open up?" I suggested. Diana gave me the glare the lame pun deserved.

"I suppose I could tell you about what this is _really _about," she said reluctantly. "They'll punish me for that, but if I don't have a choice, I don't have a choice. I could tell you about Traditions..."

I was tempted, heavens knew. I truly, deeply, desperately wanted to know what this was _really _about. And while I had never heard about the Traditions before this, I wanted to know about those too. But allowing yourself to exercise a bit of power was one thing, and to become a scheming, emotionless monster who used people for all they were worth with complete disregard for their feelings... well, that was another.

"No," I said reluctantly. "You've already given me plenty of hints, but the door is still locked. I think you have to tell me about _you_. Tell me what you feel, right this moment."

Diana shook her head.

"No way."

I made a big display out of looking down the street, raising my eyebrows.

"Isn't that a big, hairy thing over there?" I said cheerfully. "Why yes, I think it is. And it's coming this way..."

"Okay!" Diana snapped. "Okay, damn it!" She took a deep breath. "I'm scared and I'm out of my depth and I'm starting to hurt all over and in a moment I'll pass out and I hate that I'll be defenceless once that happens and when I get my hands on the son of a bitch who put me in this position I'll strangle him and I think I'm falling in love with you and I'm terrified that you're secretly Patrick Farson who's seducing me and plans to use me to get to the others and I'm tired and I'm confused and I _want this fucking door to open_!"

In the silence that took over once her voice faded out I could hear a low click. The door swung open on silent hinges.

"You're _what_?" I said dumbly. Then I realised that there had been an even more remarkable part after that one. "You think I'm _who_?"

Diana looked past me with eyes that seemed to have a hard time focusing.

"Well, what do you know?" she said unsteadily. "It worked."

Then her legs folded underneath her, and I barely had time to catch her before she dropped to the floor.

I managed to drag her through the door before it closed again, but that was as far as my ability went at the moment. I didn't think I was in any state to carry her - I was bound to drop her if I tried. Instead, I lay her down inside the door, folding my coat behind her head as a kind of makeshift pillow. That would have to do for a while.

I checked her pulse. It was steady enough. She didn't seem to have any trouble breathing. As that was as far as my knowledge in medicine extended - apart from knowing what pills to take when I had a headache - I had to assume that she would be fine with some rest. Meanwhile, I had a big house to explore, assuming that I didn't collapse myself. I didn't think I would, but I wasn't exactly feeling like I was in peak condition, either.

I was standing in a long corridor with blank metal walls that went on for - it seemed to me - quite a bit longer than the actual length of the house I had seen from the outside. Small, efficient lamps lit it from the ceiling. There seemed to be a great number of doors, all of them to the right. I started limping down the corridor, opening the doors and looking in as I went.

The first room had walls that were really screens, and endless equations moved down them. I had read a lot of books on physics, which helped me recognise a few of the shorter ones - the founding stones in the great building of calculation, as it were. If the symbols meant what I thought they meant, it all had something to do with electricity. But for every variable I could recognise, there were ten that didn't make the smallest bit of sense to me. The way it looked to me, the scientist who had written it - yet again assuming that any of this had been constructed by human hands, and had not just _appeared _- had gone straight through the Arabian alphabet, continued through the Greek alphabet and was now working his way through the Chinese alphabet.

Another room was a spider web of wires and metal threads, crisscrossing each other in some sort of surreal pattern. I thought that I could, faintly, make out the shape of something moving in there. I firmly closed that door again.

There was a room that was constantly changing. One minute, it was a modern office room, not unlike the one Diana worked in at Greystone Entertainment. The next, it was the classroom of a school, with a large blackboard, a cateder, and row after row of benches. A blink of an eye later it was what looked like a saloon from a western movie. I stood there for several minutes, but the room never repeated itself. Some of the shapes it took were downright disturbing; there was one that seemed to be a cavern in a crystal mountain, with a blue sun shining through the hexagonal windows. There were objects in there, made in some kind of black metal, but I couldn't tell if they were furniture or machinery.

One room was decorated with nothing but images of Diana. The wallpaper was meant out of pictures of her, in every age from newly born to the present. At least I assumed that the infant on the pictures was Diana. There was something in her eyes that seemed familiar; the baby seemed to be looking out at the world with an expression of wary appreciation, as if to say _So this is where I'll be living? Well, I guess I could have done worse._ Most of the floor space was occupied by very lifelike statues of her. They were all the same age, but each one portrayed a different emotion. One of them was throwing its head back and laughing, another one was in tears. One seemed to be shocked and disbelieving, while its neighbour smiled in a way that hinted of vast knowledge. Another one smiled in a different way, broad and naughty, that I couldn't quite identity at first. Then I realised that the statue was halfway through unbuttoning its blouse. I found myself blushing for no good reason. Oh. It was _that _kind of smile.

The last room I looked into was filled with paper. There was no furniture, only stacks and piles of papers lying all over the floor. All of them had at least a few words of scribbled text on them, and most were covered with notes and drawings and diagrams. All of them were done in Diana's handwriting. Just by letting my eyes run over the room I spotted pretty much all reasons there were to write something down, from grocery lists to what looked like an attempt to write a novel. The latter was full of crossed-over words and changes - apparently the author wasn't too happen with how it was turning out.

In comparison, the pages of code I found looked like an expert's work. It contained enough _#include interface.h_ and _{introduce integer variable X, Y;_ to make my head spin. But then, Diana had done this for a living. Not only that, but she apparently had some sort of intuitive understanding for how to make computers do things they ordinarily wouldn't be able to. According to what she had said, I should have that understanding too, so I spent a few minutes trying to make sense of the code, but I had no sudden flashes of revelation. The text stayed a mystery.

As I kept browsing through the piles, I found a paper where _Simon Stromberg = Patrick Farson?_ was written in large letters at the top, and underlined three times. Below it the paper was full of scribbled sentences without any apparent order. The paper was broken in several places; the writer had been using her pen with some force. I let my eyes wander down it slowly, picking up words at random. In some places, the phrases used hinted of clinical analysis. In other places - and it was infallibly in those places that the paper had been broken - you could read something resembling desperation between the lines.

_Able to find records all the way back to birth,_ it read in one place. Beneath that line, in smaller letters, the writer had added as an afterthought: _But records easy to manipulate._

_But he's got a sense of HUMOUR!_ it said in another place. I had to smile at that. Having a sense of humour was indeed proof of not being Patrick. I didn't think Patrick would know a joke if it bit him in the nose. It just wasn't his style. He might be able to fake it, though - how hard could it possibly be? This wasn't a holding argument; more of a gut feeling. Diana didn't _think _I was Patrick. She just couldn't be sure that I wasn't.

I walked out of the room and resisted the temptation of opening any more doors. It all seemed far too private. If I wanted to get to know Diana, I should do it by spending time with her, not by letting Secondary dig up her innermost thoughts and putting them into solid form. Instead, I sat down, my back against the wall. No risk of getting dust on the back of my expensive suit; there wasn't a single speck of dust or grain of dirt in here. The word _sterile_ floated into my mind, but to be honest, I liked it. The house didn't feel unfriendly anymore; Diana had asked me in, and therefore I was welcome.

I could do with a bit of a rest, I decided; I could keep on looking for whatever equipment it was Diana wanted to use after I had relaxed for a while. And I had some things that I wanted to think about.

_I think I'm falling in love with you._

Now, that was a startling revelation if there had ever been one. I had known that she liked me, for some obscure reason. I had even guessed that she was attracted to me. Why not? I'm a good-looking guy, at least I think so myself. But she had used the word 'love'. And that sort of put everything in a new perspective.

For instance, it made a voice in my head keep saying _But_why_, exactly?_ Which was a rather insulting thing to hear from one's own mind, but valid, nonetheless. Women did not, as a rule, tell me that they loved me. I seemed to recall that one had said _Damn it, Simon, I want to love you, but you just won't let me!_ That had been during our break-up fight, so all in all, I didn't think it counted for much. Besides, the woman in question - I thought her name might have been Veronica, but it had been a great many years ago and my memory was foggy - had been right on the money. Diana might be afraid of intimacy, but I wasn't - for roughly the same reason that I wasn't afraid of dying in childbirth. I wasn't capable of entering a situation where I would have anything to fear. Who could love someone like that?

Well, Diana, apparently. Or at least she thought she was starting to. And considering that she had once married a man for looks and money alone, I had a feeling that she was almost as unused to finding herself at her end of the situation as I was to finding myself at mine. It made a sort of crazy sense, I supposed. If I was her type, then she couldn't have found many men to her liking. As far as I knew, I was the only one of my type. For good reasons, too; no one else would ever want to be like me.

Okay, fine. Apparently she was insane enough to think I might be good boyfriend material. What did _I _feel about it?

Surprise and disbelief, mostly.

But wasn't there a warm feeling somewhere beneath that, though? I had had a crush on Diana since about the first time I saw her. I had done my very best not to think about it, because I deeply hated acting like a pathetic old cliché, and besides, it wasn't as if someone as charming and intelligent as she would ever be interested in someone who read physics books for fun, was it?

Only apparently it _was _like that, and that made everything extremely complicated. Of course, it also opened up all sorts of interesting possibilities. Some of them even involving clothes.

I pushed both kinds of possibilities out of the way - no prices for guessing which kind fought harder to stay - and tried to focus on what I should do. I supposed I owed it to myself to talk about this with Diana. See where we were standing, now that she had told me. And tell her of my own feelings, if I could just figure out what the hell they were...

Of course, there was an even greater problem. She thought I might be Patrick. Now, I was pretty sure - I refused to be completely sure; I had lost too many certainties already - that I was not, in fact, Patrick. I wasn't entirely sure who I was in relation to him. I had thought I must be his son, but now I was starting to feel doubtful towards that assumption. It seemed far too easy, far too _mundane _for this whole mess. But regardless, I was pretty sure I wasn't _him_. Diana, who had never seen the two of us together (if you didn't count hearing him on the phone and talking to me in person at the same time - and considering all the high-tech gadgets that seemed to be floating around here, that probably _didn't _count), could not be that sure. And the thing was that we looked almost exactly alike. If I shaved, it would take our respective mothers to tell us apart. Diana was very justified at thinking that I might be him under an assumed name.

Why was that such a problem, though? Who were these 'others' who she was afraid I was using her to get to? If there was a war going on here, what was it about, and who were the participants? And which were the stakes? Would defeat mean the loss of life, money, freedom, or what?

And what side was I on?

A good question. So far, I had - apparently - been on Patrick's side, helping to achieve whatever goals he had. I had been prepared for that work my entire life. I had done rather well, as far as I could see. If nothing else, Patrick had never been shy about giving criticism; if I had screwed up, he would have told me. Now I was well on my way to changing sides. Which was okay, I supposed, because I was pretty fed up with Patrick's side, but I'd very much like to know what side I was _joining _before I signed anything. It could, conceivably, be worse. Though that was a depressing thought to be sure...

It all came down to who Patrick really was. I had always assumed that he was in finance, or possibly working for the government in one way or another. Apparently, things were a lot more complicated than that. He might work for the government, but I had a feeling that he wasn't your ordinary federal agent or low-level administrator. Or your ordinary anything.

I realised that I wasn't getting anywhere and that I should probably get up and make myself useful. I got to my feet with a groan and walked unsteadily off to see what I could find in this crazy place.

What I could find, apparently, was an elevator. There were no stairs to accompany it. I supposed that low-tech stuff like that had no place here. This place was all about technology. Or maybe not exactly that. More like the _idea _of technology - the _perception _of technology. It was a part of human nature to assign a will to everything, because ultimately, the human mind was incapable of understanding the concept of not wanting anything.

Here, if a computer started spitting out error messages, it really _would _be out of spite. Here, science was a living thing. I didn't even try to understand those revelations, or even question where they came from. Not because my curiosity had decreased, but because these questions were meaningless. On one level, I already understood; and on the other, I probably never would.

The elevator had three buttons. I pushed the middle one, but that just took me to another corridor, exactly the same as the one I had left, only without Diana in the other end. I pushed the top one, and blinked at what I saw when the doors opened again. No more stainless steel and endless doors. I was standing in a perfectly normal hallway.

Well, mostly normal. There was a bench standing next to the wall, and it was full of strange pieces of machinery and piles of glittering microchips. So was the hat rack. So, I noted, was the table in the living-room, which I could faintly make out through an open door. This was Diana's apartment. It was even more of a workshop nightmare here than in Primary, but it was her apartment, all right. And since it contained even _more _stuff here than it did in its normal incarnation, chances were that the things she was looking for would be here. Finally something was going right.

In addition, there was probably a bed here somewhere, in which Diana would be more comfortable than she was now - provided, of course, that I removed all the equipment that was likely to occupy it. Also provided I could get her to it. The elevator meant I wouldn't have to carry her up the stairs, which I appreciated, but I was still feeling a bit shaky from being harassed by insane, electric antennas.

Well, I would just have to be a bit more careful, that was all. If she was having feelings for me, I'd hate to dampen them by dropping her on the floor...

I went down to the ground floor again. Diana was still out cold next to the door, but when I tried to lift her, she gave off a soft groan and opened her eyes. Her gaze was a bit unsteady.

"Simon...?" she mumbled.

"It's okay," I said. "I'm just going to get you to a place where you can rest better. Go back to sleep."

"No, I can walk," she said. I gave her a doubtful glance. "I can walk!" she insisted. "If you support me a bit, I can walk."

So we ended up staggering along the length of the corridor, arms over each other's shoulders, like two drinking buddies on their way home from the pub. We went up in the elevator, and Diana led me into her bedroom. Most of it was occupied by a computer system on a desk. Parts of it were also under, in front of, and to the sides of the desk. It was a very large system, far from the hard-drive-keyboard-screen version I personally used at home. I didn't even recognise most of the additions. Of course, this was Diana's place - I had a feeling that Bill Gates wouldn't do much better at identifying the machines she was using.

The bed was, surprisingly, void of gadgets. Diana dropped down on it with a sigh of relief.

"Ah, that's better," she said.

"Your sheets have fluffy bunnies on them," I noted casually.

"What?" She looked down on them, her expression almost comically startled. "They do! They bloody well do! This is _not _how my bed really looks! My sheets are _black_! And completely bunny-free!"

"Maybe Secondary wants to tell you that you're really a vulnerable child inside?" I said innocently.

Diana growled and buried her face in her hands.

"I can't wait until we get out of here! What does this place get off to, telling me I've got all these issues I have to deal with? I know I've got issues! I _like _my issues! I don't _want _to deal with them! Where's the fun in being perfect, anyway?"

"I wouldn't know," I said honestly and sat down at the foot end of the bed. "Will you be okay?"

"Yeah." She dropped her hands back onto the sheets, which were indeed covered with adorable, furry animals. "I'm just out of energy. And in this place, energy comes back quickly. Give me half an hour, and I'll start putting together a beacon." She yawned. "Until then, I'll just have to try to overcome my intense disgust of this insulting bed."

"If you're not going back to sleep," I said, "can I ask you something?"

"Sure." She smiled tiredly. "This whole 'woman with all the answers thing' is starting to grow on me. Maybe I should take a protégé."

"What's a technomancer?" I asked. "Maurin asked you if that's what you were, and you said yes."

Diana looked at me silently for a moment. I wondered if maybe I had committed some kind of faux pa. Maybe it was a terrible insult in Empowered circles to ask someone what a technomancer was. But that didn't sound very plausible. I knew nothing of Empowered circles, but I knew something about Diana, and she wasn't easily insulted, or easily shocked by tactlessness.

"It had to be that one, didn't it?" she then said flatly. "It had to be the big one. Just when I'm feeling the most unsuited for it, you have to ask me the question that'll start the most complicated discussion I can think of."

"I'm sorry," I said, startled. "You don't have to answer."

"That's right, I don't." She frowned. "In fact, I probably _shouldn't _answer. Against my orders and all that." A thin smile crossed her lips. "But at this point, I feel like I owe you better than that."

"Look, you don't owe me anything," I said. "In fact, you've helped me a lot more than anyone could have asked of you already. If you're going to get in serious trouble for it..."

"It's not that." She grinned. "I've been in trouble all my life. It's my thing. But if I tell you what a technomancer is, you're going to freak out."

"Diana," I said dryly. "During the last two days, I have been threatened, humiliated, mystified and, finally, outright attacked by various computers. I have reached a higher level of awareness and almost driven insane by it. I have found out that my entire life up to this point has been a part of some sort of shadowy agenda by a man I thought was my godfather and whom everyone else seems to think is _me_. And, jus to top it off, I have been kidnapped to some sort of alternative reality and forced to make my way across it, with all what that has entailed. What I'm trying to get at is that if I was planning to freak out, you would currently be looking at a thoroughly out-freaked man. Just tell me what a technomancer is. There is very little left that can still surprise me."

Diana smiled. It was a tired smile, but she was looking more like herself for every second.

"Can I take that as a promise?"

"Yes!" I said firmly.

"Okay, then." She took a deep breath. "A technomancer is a mage who performs magick through the use of technology."

I stared at her, waiting for her to laugh. But as the seconds passed by, I realised that she wasn't going to. She had given me the truth, as she saw it. I might have felt as surprised if I, when reading through a new book on physics, found that the author not only believe in Santa Claus, but used the fat, red-clad guy's existence as proof that an object could move faster than light-speed - that sled seemed to have no troubles with it, after all, so it must be possible. So far, everything Diana had said had sounded like a sort of pseudo-science. Now, it seemed that her science was a lot more pseudo than I had imagined.

"Magic," I said hollowly.

"Magick," she correctly automatically. There was a subtle difference in how she pronounced it. "With a K at the end. Don't ask me why, I guess someone thought that it looked flashier that way. Simon, are you all right?"

The words _You're__ insane_ entered my mind. For a second I cling to them. They represented a rational response, after all. If someone told you magic existed, you told her that she was insane. Simple. Logical. Sensible.

Before I managed to get them out of my mouth, however, I remembered that I was sitting in a house that looked like an inventor's nightmare, in a dimension populated by yellow midgets with a taste for human flesh. Once you had accepted all that, what was a little magic - oh, sorry, _magick _- between friends?

"Will you... please... define the word... magick...?" I said, struggling to remain calm. It wasn't easy. The events of the last two days were falling into place, and it was a very ugly place. If you had to make allowances for the laws of nature, a lot of what I had been through seemed impossible. If you accepted the concept of magic, though, it all made sense. Or rather, it didn't, but it was _okay _that it didn't made sense, because it was magical. Magic didn't make sense. That was what made it magic instead of science.

"That's a tough one," Diana said. She was using the soft, mild voice that one employs when talking to someone that's very close to having a hysterical breakdown. "How about 'changing the world through force of will'?"

"Reality is subjective," I whispered, mostly to myself. The phrase suddenly made sense. An awful, horrible sense. I felt like the world was falling apart around me. When I had first started reading about quantum physics, and understood that what I had believed to be unshakable laws of nature was nothing more than the most probably outcome, I had walked around in a state of mild shock for days. This was like that, only a thousand times more so.

"That's right, reality is subjective," Diana said. "It's formed by the will and belief of all living minds together. We call that the Consensus." She smiled uncertainly. "The universe itself is the ultimate democracy. You wouldn't have thought it, would you?"

The thing was, I would. That's why I wasn't trying to deny what she was telling me. That's why I just sat back and accepted it. Because part of me had known it all along, had known it ever since I had come back from my meeting with Patrick. Ever since the moment of my Empowering.

"I... see," I said in a very small voice.

"How are you?" Diana said. "You've gone all pale." She laughed uncertainly. "I remember when Tanja explained this to _me_. I think I told her she was a nutcase. We all have different ways of handling unexpected revelations."

"I'll... I'll be fine," I said. "I'll be fine. It's just that it's a lot to take in. This is actually true, isn't it? Nothing I've seen has been technology at all. It's been magic."

"Well, it's been both at once, actually," Diana said, "because that's what technomancy is, but yes, it's been magick."

"Then everything I've ever known has been a lie," I said. There was a horrible emptiness in my voice that even scared myself.

"No, it's been true." Diana sat up and put a comforting hand on my shoulder. "To a certain degree, what you've been told is true. But to a certain degree, _everything _is true."

"Because reality is subjective," I said.

Diana smiled at me.

"You learn quickly," she congratulated me.

Diana sat down beside me at the foot of the bed, making herself comfortable. I seemed unable to stop staring into space. Magic. The ability to change the world through force of will, Diana had said. The power to order the universe around, to alter the rules to suit you. It was possible.

A voice spoke up in my mind. In comparison to the rest of the chaos in there, it was very strong and clear.

_I want to do that,_ it said.

And I did. The human brain is a sturdy thing. It's designed to adapt. A few minutes ago, the foundations of my world had been destroyed. Now, my mind had started making the necessary adjustments. If I believed - and obviously, I did, against all reason and against everything I had ever known - then I should investigate the possibilities of this new world. I should find out what the rules were and how things were done. I should explore it.

Wasn't that what I had always wanted, in retrospect? Wasn't that what I had filled what parts of my life Patrick hadn't managed to occupy with? To find things out - to explore. I had always been curious, and the Empowering had seemed to magnify that trait to an extent that was almost absurd. I wanted to know everything about everything. And now I had a whole new (subjective) reality to explore. Wasn't I the lucky one?

That thought almost managed to make me smile.

"The Consensus," Diana said, "is, basically, what you get if you add every human being's view of the world together and then divide by the number of human beings. Think of it as a kind of compromise. If a lot of people believe something, then that's more true - more real - than something that only one person thinks." She smiled. "And lucky for us, or all the mentally disturbed people of the world would turn it into an even more confusing place than it already is. The point is that everyone's belief affects the world a little, but the belief of many affects the world a lot. With me so far?"

I nodded. I didn't really trust my voice right now.

"Well, so then we have a world where the rules are decided by majority. If the majority thinks the sky is blue, then the sky is blue. If a few thousand people got together and decided that they wanted the sky to be red, maybe it would shift a little bit more towards purple, but don't count on it. Because let's face it, this planet of ours is _packed _with people. There are six billion blue-believers out there, and they generate _lots _of belief. So what we've got is a world - even more, a reality - where things tend to be exactly as the most people want it. Or as they believe it to be, rather, but that's almost the same thing; people usually tend to believe that everything is more or less the way they want it to be, because that's what gets them through the day. So a few nonconformists get disappointed, but hey, they're a minority, so it's okay, right?"

I nodded warily. Diana chuckled and shook her head.

"Wrong! It's _not _okay! Just because the others are many it doesn't make it okay for them to decide how your life is going to turn out. That should be your decision. And the good news is, it can be."

"Magic," I said. It wasn't a question.

"Magick," Diana agreed. "If you knew how to do it, and you've got the willpower, you can alter the Consensus in a limited way. You can ignore the majority. And that's all magick is, really. It's saying 'I won't let anyone else choose for me'. It's saying 'My life is my own'. It's telling the universe 'Yes I can' one more time than it can tell you 'No you can't'. You can do it with computers and machines and cybernetic implants, or you can do it with ancient runes and spells and eye of newt and all that stuff, or you can do it with... with _meatloaf _if you think that'll work better for you. But that's just different techniques. What it all comes down to is telling the high and mighty Consensus to go screw itself."

Somehow, the idea of telling the Consensus to go screw itself greatly appealed to me. To obey the law of gravity because it was an integral part of the necessary order of the universe was one thing. To obey the law of gravity because everyone else demanded that I stay on the ground was quite another. I'm not sure why, but that was how it felt.

"I can see where this is leading," I said. I managed a weak smile. "The Empowering. It makes you think that you're above all the rules. It takes an Empowered person to do what you said, doesn't it?"

"Surprisingly enough, no." Diana wrinkled her brow. "Anyone can learn how to do magick. I've got a friend who's about as Empowered as a brick, but he can still run technomantic statistics programs and predict the future as neatly as you please. He's nowhere _near _as powerful as I am, and he never will be, but there's no denying that what he does is magick."

"But it makes it easier?" I insisted.

"Absolutely. About a million times easier. Empowered people are custom-made for magehood." She looked at me, her expression very serious. "And that also means that once you've become Empowered, you _will _use magick. You just won't be able to help yourself. If you study, and get some sort of structure on it, you'll control it. Otherwise it'll control you. Either way, there's no way for you to get rid of it."

"I don't want to get rid of it," I said. And I didn't. If magick existed, then I wanted it. Wanted it so badly that it hurt. Wanted it, I suppose, from the bottom of my Empowered soul. It wasn't that I wanted to kick people around with hypnotic programs and cybernetic enhancements. It wasn't even really that I wanted to defend myself from all the people - and other things than people - who seemed to have no qualms about kicking _me _around. It was that I wanted to understand this world that I had been shown, and there was no better way to do that than to become part of it.

"At some point you will." Diana smiled sadly. "There hasn't been a mage so far who never wanted to go back to the days when things were nice and simple."

"You too?"

"As I said, there hasn't been a mage so far." She grinned. "But that was just because I was feeling generally shitty at the time. Magick has a price, but it's worth it. Don't forget that."

I nodded. As far as I could see, seeing the world as it really was had to be worth any cost.

"One more question?" I said humbly.

She winced, smiling.

"You and your question. Yes, okay, one more. Then I have to start working."

"What is the Empowering? I mean, what is it that actually _happens_? And _why _does it happen?"

She stared at the wall for a moment, biting her lip. Then she turned back to me, her forehead still wrinkled.

"No one really knows," she said. "There's lots of theories, but no one's sure. If you want to know what I believe, it's something you do to yourself. If you wish deeply enough that your life was different, that the _world _was different, then eventually some sort of barrier in your mind breaks, and you realise that you can make both your life and the world change."

_If you wish deeply enough that your life was different._

I didn't say so, but Diana's theory fitted my own personal case very well indeed.


	5. Furball

_DISCLAIMER: The world isn't mine, the characters are, and so on and so forth…_

_Oh, and sorry for taking my sweet time with this chapter. A bunch of other projects got in the way._

_I have a feeling I might be upsetting some Werewolf: the Apocalypse__ fans with this chapter, but that is as may be. Come on, the story is entitled Reign of Conformity__ – did you really expect it to give a positive view of creatures who have a pack mentality by nature? =] _

***

I watched in awed silence as Diana pieced together the most outlandish contraption I had ever seen from the contents of her Secondary home. There was no actual structure to it; it consisted of a great variety of different devices, lying all over her bedroom floor connected with wires. Some of them, I noticed, seemed to be modified household appliances. And she had to plunder a flashlight and a walkman for batteries.

  "Why?" I asked when I saw her do it. "It's not like this place doesn't have electricity of its own. It so happens I can testify to that personally."

  She smiled faintly, but didn't look up from her work.

  "Partly, I don't want to entrust more than I have to to what passes for an electric company around here," she said. "This place is impressionable. The head of the powerplant might have a row with his wife in the morning, and that might cause everything around here to shut down. You never know. If you want to make it as a mage, you'd better learn this: everyone and everything _will _eventually screw you over, but there's no need to make it _easy _for them."

  "That's a rather depressing rule to live by, isn't it?"

  She shrugged, bent over the black, rectangular box she was currently attaching to her growing network.

  "I seem to get by okay."

  "You said 'partly'. What's the other reason?"

  She turned her head to look at me and grinned.

  "Study advanced electronics for a few years, and you might even understand if I explained that to you."

  I took the point. As Diana had explained magick, it had almost seemed like you had only to wish for something to make it so. Apparently, things were somewhat more complicated than that. I supposed I would have to find a teacher.

  Diana herself seemed like the obvious choice. She certainly knew her stuff, I had seen that often enough. And she actually seemed to care about me, which was always a benefit in a teacher. I looked at her working, putting together whatever machine she was building with complete attention and not a second's doubt to where anything should go. And yes, I _also _noticed the way her long, dark hair fell around her face when she leaned forward and how gracefully her slender fingers handled the tools and parts. She really looked like a modern sorceress right then, a Circe who had given up her wands and potions in favour of microchips and wires, but who had lost none of her beauty or allure.

  Eventually she seemed satisfied, standing back from what looked to me like a spider-web of gadgets. Some of them were humming, others were blinking, and all of them gave off a definite feeling that something was being done. I just wished that I could be sure that the 'something' was not blowing up both to hell.

  "Well, it sure _looks _impressive," I said. "But what does it actually _do_?"

  Diana snorted.

  "Oh, ye weak of faith. This, I'm telling you, is what will get us home. It's a homing device. It yells _We__ want to get out of here!_ to anyone who's got the right senses to hear it."

  I was not quite sure that I liked the sound of that. Diana might have friends and associates who would be inclined to help her, but she had already admitted to having enemies, as well. _I _most certainly had one.

  "What if the wrong person hears it?" I said.

  She grinned.

  "Then things get interesting." She laughed at my expression and padded me on the upper arm. "Oh, don't worry. The homing device transmits my name. The... mage community, I suppose you should call it... in the real world knows who I am, and they knows that screwing with me isn't clever. Secondary creatures might not have any idea who I am, because I don't usually hang out around here, but they can't just appear out of nowhere. They'll have to use the door - and it was hard enough getting _you _in, and you I _wanted _here."

  "That's true," I admitted. "So do we just have to wait a few minutes, until one of your friends picks us up? Or do they have to get to your house in the real... in Primary?"

  "Er..."

  I disliked that _er_. I can't quite remember when I last heard an _er_that I disliked more than the one Diana uttered at that time.

  "Diana?" I said, having a feeling that I was not going to like the explanation.

  "Well, I can't send a signal across the dimensional axis, you know," she said, somewhat sheepishly. "If I could do that I'd have us home in two minutes flat. All I can do is call for help all over Secondary and hope that someone picks up the signal."

  "I see," I said. "When, approximately, will this happen?"

  "I know at least two people who have regular contact with Secondary," she assured me. "One of them will find us, the next time they open a crossdimensional interface."

  "Which they will do as soon as...?" I insisted.

  "Within a few days, maybe."

  I gave her a flat look.

  "A few weeks, at most," she added.

  "You do realise that I'll very likely be fired for taking an unscheduled vacation?" I said.

  She sighed.

  "Okay, I'm sorry, but I can't really _do _anything more. This isn't my turf. I don't know who has the power to send us back, but I do know that most entities here would kill me for asking. We're more or less safe here, and eventually we'll get picked up, but that's the best solution I have." Suddenly she looked tired. "I didn't want this anymore than you did, you know. The problem with being a mage is that these things sort of happen every now and then. You have more control over your life, but you've also got less control over your schedule."

  "You're right;" I said. "It's not your fault. I'm sorry."

  She smiled thinly.

  "No problem. I'm feeling a bit aggravated myself. But if we're going to spend a few weeks together, we'd better be polite to each other."

  "I _have _to be polite," I said dryly. "I make a point out of not being rude to cyborg mages who can lift me over their heads like I was a kitten."

  Diana laughed, which made me feel a bit better. I had wanted to get to know her outside of the office, hadn't I? It looked like I would get my wish, whether I wanted to or not. I might as well make the most of it. This was a big place, if you counted the two lower floors; surely it must be possible to spend a little time here together with a charming woman without getting cabin fever?

  As for work... well, I might be able to make up some sort of excuse along the lines of having fallen down the stairs and spent the whole time in a coma. And if they didn't buy it, well, so what? I had enough savings that I could take my time looking for a new job. Patrick would be furious, of course, but to hell with _him_.

  I walked over to the window and looked out at the street. The antennas that made up the lawn moved peacefully, as if rocked by a breeze. The streetlights were still shining. Apparently, everything in the power plant manager's domestic life was going well.

  "I never knew any of this existed," I said. "But when you see it... Well, it sort of makes _sense_, doesn't it? A few times I haven't been able to believe my eyes, but thinking back on it, it's not _that _strange. Even something like Maurin..."

  "I know." Diana walked up to stand beside me, leaning against the window sill. She was smiling gently. "If everyone didn't believe, deep inside, that all this stuff existed, then it wouldn't. That's the Consensus for you. It doesn't just care about what you think you believe, it cares about what you feel. I suppose Maurin is an incarnation of street violence or something. You _think _you believe that gang members or whatever are just kids with problems and seriously twisted values, but what you _really _believe is that they're monsters who're lurking in dark alleys and wants to eat you." She laughed, a little sadly. "And since the Consensus doesn't approve of gang members turning into goblins, that belief manifests here instead."

  "So humanity _created_ Maurin?" I turned my head to look at her, but she didn't take her eyes off of the window. "What about what he believes? Doesn't that affect the Consensus?"

  "Now you're going into deep philosophy." She smiled. "There are mages who spend years discussing things like that. Okay, so human belief defines reality, but what counts as human and what counts as belief? Amoebas probably believe that the world is made up of two things; they and the food. Is that why we've got corporate takeovers and megalomaniacs and greed in general? There sure are enough amoebas around to give a settling vote."

  I had to chuckle at the thought of countless single-cell organisms creating the world in their image simply because they were in majority.

  "It sure gives your self-esteem a nasty kick, doesn't it?" I said.

  "Yeah. But not even most of the people who sponsors that theory believe in it. They're just using it to make a point."

  "A point?"

  Diana rolled her eyes and shook a fist in the air.

  "'Down with the tyranny of the weak!'" she intoned. She shook her head. "I don't give much for someone who'd compare Sleepers with amoebas. We mages are arrogant bastards by nature, and maybe that's okay, but some of us don't seem to see the difference between individualism and elitism. If there had been less of us like that, maybe we wouldn't be in such a bloody jam right now."

  I blinked.

  "You and me wouldn't?"

  "Mages in general wouldn't." She looked amused. "Please don't ask. It's a long story, and I don't feel up to it right now. I'll tell you about the Ascension War tomorrow."

  The Ascension War? I groaned inwards. Yet another thing I wasn't being told about. I was starting to realise that even though there were answers to all my questions and not entirely impossible for me to get them, there was a whole lot of questions, and every answer led to a bunch of new ones. I'd have to spend my entire life finding the answers, and I'd still not be satisfied when I died.

  But what the heck. There were worse ways to spend your life than to dedicate it to learning. And if satisfaction meant a state of not wanting more of anything, then no one died satisfied. Everyone died wanting more life.

  Then I came up with another question, and it was:

  "Is there a guy standing over there?"

  Diana wrinkled her brow and leaned in closer to the window. As for me, I didn't have to, because I got more certain by ever moment. He was standing in the shadows, right between the circles of light from two streetlights, but there was enough illumination to make him out. He was tall and bulky, and dressed in nothing but a pair of jeans. I couldn't make out his face, but a tiny speck of red light hinted that the guy was smoking a cigarette.

  "Oh, damn," she said. She rushed over to a table and took up some sort of device with a screen and three antennas. She fiddled with it as she walked back to the window. "Please don't be, please don't be, please don't be..." she muttered as she stared at the screen as if hypnotised. Then she groaned and looked up. "Figures. He is."

  "Is what?" I said. I was starting to feel like I was having one of those nightmares where you're hiding in a house and there's something horrible outside of it. The man on the other side of the street didn't _look _that horrible, though. He was large, yes, but so was I, and Diana had abilities I couldn't even imagine - so what was she getting so worked up about?

  "A furball." She frowned. "Shit, this is bad. I can't go one on one with a fucking furball, no way..."

  "That's a furball?" I looked with new interest. As far as I could make out, the stranger's chest really was remarkably hairy, but not so you'd think it was strange. Some men are like that. "He doesn't look so dangerous."

  "Not now, no. He'll look pretty damn dangerous once he goes feral on us."

  I remembered what Maurin had said.

  "So furballs really do turn into wolves?" I said.

  Diana hesitated.

  "Sort of. It's not really wolves they turn into, it's something much larger and meaner, but they look enough like wolves to get the legend started."

  "What _are _they?" I was slightly more curious than scared at this point. If nothing else, as Diana had pointed out, this house was hard to get into if its owner wanted to keep you out. "Secondary residents? Like Maurin?"

  "No one really knows, to be honest." Diana drummed her fingers on the window sill in a nervous rhythm, her face tense. "They're human enough that they can blend with mundane society without getting discovered. They've got some sort of magic, though not as strong as ours, and they can pass through dimensions much easier than we can. Silver hurts them, but not much else. And they hate humans, and they _really _hate mages. I've heard some people say that they are nature mysticks who gave up their free will and most of their magick to some sort of noncorporeal entity, and in return they got the raw power to destroy the corruption in the world." She made a disgusted sound. "And with corruption, they mean pretty much everything that's happened since we came down from the trees."

  "I take it you're not on friendly terms?" I said dryly.

  "Not really, no. They stay away from cities, mostly, so we don't have to deal with them all that often... but Secondary cities don't count. They really _hate _finding us here. They think it's a place no human was meant to go, so if we do, they try to make sure we don't come back."

  The furball threw the cigarette over his shoulder, left his post in the shadows and started walking, slowly but purposefully, towards the door of Diana's house. He had long hair and a thick beard, I noticed, and was handsome, in a rugged sort of way.

  "Well," Diana said, "there goes my hope of him not knowing we were in here." She went into her bedroom and sat down in front of the computer, waiting impatiently for it to start up. "Maybe if I can modify some sort of mind-altering program a little we might have a chance. If the house's defences can keep him out that long." She started typing frantically.

  "Is there anything I can do to help?" I said, keeping an eye on the furball. He was approaching what I for lack of a better term thought of as the lawn. Considering that Diana had assured me that he was here to kill us both, I was quite looking forward to him making the acquaintance of the antennas.

  "Watch the damn guy and tell me what he does," Diana said absently. "If I'm going to fight him, I have to know how quickly he's coming."

  "Right. He's gotten to the antennas now." I watched as the furball stopped, confused by the metal rods that suddenly folded to block his path. Then he scowled and tried to push them out of his way. I smiled thinly at the sight of him stumbling back, clutching his hand. "It doesn't look as if he and they got along."

  For a moment, I was confused that I hadn't heard the scream the man had very obviously given off. I had seen his mouth open, but there had been no sound, just as his steps made no sound. Then I remembered that there had been no windows on the outside, but a great deal of video cameras. I wasn't looking out of a window, I was looking at an extremely accurate screen.

  Trust Diana not to want anything simple…

  The furball was standing outside of the reach of the defences, studying them with his head slightly tilted, like a man viewing a complicated logical problem. Then he tightened his fists and seemed to take a deep breath.

  I still couldn't hear anything. If I had, his cry would probably have made my ears hurt. I actually thought I could feel the vibrations in the floor from his roar, but that was probably just my imagination.

  For a moment, nothing happened. I realised that I was holding my breath and inhaled again, chuckling weakly. He had just been expressing his frustration. Fully understandable, and a good sign for us. But for a moment, just for a moment, I would have expected…

  This time the ground did shake, and even the floor of Diana's fortified house trembled. The antennas lining the walkway swung back and forth, like the tendrils of a dying octopus. The furball just stood there, with a frown on his face and his fists tightened, like he was daring the world to disobey him.

  From beneath the stone-clad walkway, raw earth rose. Steel and stone was pushed aside, bending and shattering. Dark, moist soil came pouring out of the ground, like blood from a wound. In a manner of seconds, it had created a ramp from the street to the doorstep, out of reach for the remaining antennas.

  _Raw power, Diana had said. __Raw power – enough raw power to destroy the corruption in the world. This power looked pretty raw to me. And while I was dead set against corruption, I was starting to feel a bit sorry for it._

  "Diana," I said, perhaps a bit unsteadily. "I… I think he just managed to get to the door."

  "I sort of guessed," the mage mumbled. Her eyes never left the screen. "By using some sort of furball hocus-pocus, I'm guessing."

  "He made the ground rise and give him a road," I said flatly.

  "Ah. That's pretty impressive, as furball magic goes." She didn't _sound too impressed. "I'd like to see him hack into the Syndicate's bookkeeping files, though."_

  Whose_ bookkeeping files? I wanted to ask. I decided not to, however. There was an angry gentleman with significant power approaching, and Diana was trying to prepare a defence against him. Curiosity had its time, but this was not it._

  I would also have liked to know what was pretty impressive as _mage magic went, if Diana could be so unconcerned about controlling the ground itself. I __also hoped very much that I would live to acquire that level of magic._

  The furball was disappearing beneath the lower edge of the screen. I recall that the outside cameras had moved as they watched us, so presumably I could lower this one and get the furball back in sight again. The theory was sound, but there didn't seem to be any buttons or leverages around.

  But… since the dominant theme around here seemed to be high technology…

  "Down," I mumbled, not wanting Diana to hear me in case it turned out I was wrong. "Camera down?" The scene remained unchanged. "Lower? Lower camera?"

  Nothing happened, except that I started to feel silly. This wasn't working. Despite appearances, this was _not science fiction, but real life. Machines didn't normally respond to voice commands, so why should this one? Diana probably ran them from her computer or something._

  Still… if it _was magick, then it should be less a matter of what I said then how I said it. Or so I had seemed to understand by Diana's explanation. So, if I wanted a reaction, I needed to try and remember how Patrick had managed to get __me to do whatever he said. I was pretty sure that that had been magick too._

  "**Down!" I ordered.**

  The view in the window slowly tilted downwards, finally showing the furball from above. He was still standing by the door. As I watched, he punched it. It was a serious punch, with all his considerable weight and muscle-power behind it, but the door _was made of steel. I flinched at the sight. This guy was out of his mind!_

  "He's hitting the door," I said with awe. "He's actually hitting the door. Damn, he's got to have crushed every bone in his hand, but he's _still going at it…"_

  "Don't count on it," Diana grumbled. "I told you, silver hurts them, but almost nothing else does."

  "Can they punch in steel doors?" I asked, feeling that this as more to the point.

  "Not usually, no."

  But the furball was certainly trying. Whatever power he had over the earth, it was obviously not enough to tip the entire house. Equally obvious was that he didn't like that fact.

  Something from out of a bedtime story came into my head. _Then I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow__ your house down. I smiled. In the end, the Big Bad Wolf of the fairytale had been defeated by superior technology. Maybe this one would be too._

  The furball paused, giving the door a glare that should rightly have disintegrated it at the spot. Then he just vanished. One moment he was there, and the next he wasn't.

  "Er, Diana?" I said. "He just disappeared. Do you think he gave up?"

  "Highly doubtful," Diana said absently. "But he might have crossed back to Primary." For the first time, the tapping of the keyboard buttons seized as Diana froze. "Oh, shit. In Primary, this house isn't defended at _all…"_

  It took me a moment, but then I understood. If the furball could just switch between dimensions as easily as taking a step forward, there was nothing stopping him from entering the room in Primary and then crossing over again, effectively sidestepping the door, the elevator and whatever else the house had planned for him. He could just walk through the door any minute.

  This might get ugly.

  Diana s started typing again, even faster this time.

  "I won't be able to be as thorough as I'd like to be," she said through clenched teeth. "But if I just change a few more lines, and then compile it all…"

  I certainly hoped that she would hurry up. Not knowing where the furball was made my skin crawl. I kept wanting to turn around to see if the half-naked thug was standing behind me, with those powerful hands gripping for my throat. I gulped. I really do hate physical violence. I just don't seem to be equipped for it.

  At the same time, my own fear made me angry. What right had that brute to make me feel this way? What had I ever done to him? He was coming to kill me and Diana both, and I didn't even know him. What sort of person went around killing people he didn't even know? Destroying corruption? Defending nature? For all he knew, I could have been donating a fortune to Greenpeace every year. I wasn't, of course, but I could have been.

  I went into the kitchen. If nothing else, I could at least get a knife. I'd be damned if I was going to give up without a fight, even if it'd take silver to hurt the furball for real. I could at least annoy it.

  As I went through some drawers – most of them contained electronic gadgets instead of cutlery – I felt it. It was like a tension in the back of my head, like a rough touch on a half-healed wound. It didn't exactly hurt, but it felt unpleasant.

  I saw his shadow before I saw the man himself. It was long and dark, and it fell on the floor next to me. I looked up without hurry, knowing what I would see. He was standing there, a disgusted scowl on his face, like he was looking at something that had climbed out of a toilet.

  "Warlock scum," the furball snarled.

I backed away from him, keeping my motions slow and calm. If he was really half wolf, sudden movements might make him attack. The furball followed, matching step for step, that repulsed frown still curving his lips.

  "I haven't done anything to you," I said, struggling to make my voice steady and precise. "You have no reason to be hostile."

  "Done nothing, he says," the furball growled. "Done nothing, when the earth moans for every step you take!"

  I wondered faintly if he meant that I ought to go on a diet.

  "Does it, now?" I said, raising an eyebrow. "That's funny, because I've never heard anything."

  "Of course you haven't, asshole. You've plugged your ears. You don't listen to anything but your own voice. You make me sick!"

  I couldn't back away anymore. I had my back against the wall. The furball stopped one step away from me, filling my sight with his massive bulk. I could smell his breath, beer and tobacco and something sour that I thought might be raw meat.

  "_I don't listen to anything but my own voice?" I said coldly. "You waltz in here spitting out accusations, but you don't for a second think to ask for my opinion. You have some nerve!"_

  He laughed, then, loudly and harshly.

  "You want a _trial, warlock? Huh? Fine. I'll give you a fucking trial, okay? I accuse you of being an arrogant son of a bitch who's forgotten the mother who gave you life. I accuse you of breaking the laws of the universe." He brought his face closer, until our the tips of our noses almost touched. His eyes were big and brown and angry. "How do you fucking __plead?"_

  "Not guilty," I said flatly. "I called my mother as late as last Tuesday, I'll have you know."

  He laughed again and punched me in the face. Or, well, as far as he was concerned it was probably a playful slap. I think he even used the palm of his hand instead of making a fist. It didn't matter. My head was still struck to the side with such force that I for a moment was afraid that he had broken my neck, and unbelievable pain flared up in my jawbone. I gasped, struggling to stay on my feet.

  "Don't give me that bullshit. You know what I mean. The Earth, warlock. You've used the hell out of it, and not given _shit back! That's kind of like raping your own mother. But maybe you've done that too, huh?" He chuckled. "You denying that you're a fucking warlock?"_

  There didn't seem to be an awful lot of a meaning with that. If I wasn't a mage, how had I gotten to Secondary? For a moment – just a moment – I had the idea of saying "I don't know what you're talking about, it was this horrible woman who took me here, she's in the next room, please save me from her!" I'm not sure I'll ever stop feeling ashamed of even thinking that, but to my credit, I disqualified that idea after half a second or so. Maybe I could have sold someone else out to save my own worthless hide, but not Diana. Hell, no.

  "No," I said, my voice a bit blurred by the fact that I was afraid to move my jaw too much, fearing that it might fall off or something. "No, I'm a mage."

  "Yeah?" The furball smirked. "Well, then you've admitted that you're invading on Gaia's territory. She gets to make the rules, asshole. You fucking well don't!"

  I ignored the ache in my jaw enough to give off what was supposed to be a defiant sneer.

  "I don't take orders from her. I don't take orders from you. I can't see why I should."

  "No. Fucks like you never do." One of those big, calloused hands lashed out and grabbed me around the throat. "So the verdict is _guilty, and the sentence is __death. Bye-bye, warlock."_

  He squeezed, and suddenly there wasn't any air to be had. I tried to pull his hand off, but despite the fact that I've to plenty of muscle power, it was like trying to lift a mountain.

  Furiously I willed something, _anything to happen, some twist of fate to save me from this maniac. I was Empowered; I should be able to change reality to suit me. Reality right now was that I was in the hands of someone much stronger and tougher than I, and if that kept going, I would die in a minute or so. Probably less. So reality would have to change. The Consensus would have to budge just a little._

  _He'll have a change of heart and decide to let me live, I thought, putting all my mental strength into the idea. __He will! He will__!_

  The thick fingers kept squeezing my throat. The brutishly handsome face kept staring into mine, without a hint of remorse in it, only hatred and grim satisfaction.

  _His arm will cramp! I thought. __He'll have to let me go! Damn it, I demand__ that his arm will cramp! Cramp! CRAMP!_

  This time I thought I could _feel the power rushing through my Empowered soul, __feel the fragile strands of reality break from my touch. In retrospect, it was probably just wishful thinking. In either case, the furball's arm didn't grow any weaker, and the furball's face didn't betray any signs of pain._

  Something_ will bloody well happen! I thought wildly as flashes of light appeared in front of my eyes. My lungs felt like they were bursting. __I refuse to die here! Something has to happen to stop that!_

  "Put him down, you fucking throwback!" Diana's voice said. Vaguely, as if I was just watching from a distance, I was aware that the furball opened his hand and gave me a chance to take a long, wheezing breath. It felt as if I was inhaling liquid fire instead of air, but it didn't matter. It still felt wonderful.

  My legs folded under me, and I sank down to the floor. I would have found that to be very humiliating, had anyone currently paid any attention to me. No one did. Diana and the furball were occupied with each other.

  She stood in the entrance to the kitchen, arms crossed over her chest. She looked tired, and very small compared with the furball, but she also looked like someone who had had a rough day and was not going to take any crap from anyone.

  _Did I make her come? I thought. __Was that magick? I figured that it probably wasn't, but I supposed I couldn't be sure. I had demanded that the situation would chance, and it had. And considering the circumstances, did it really matter if I had performed magick or not?_

  Apparently the furball didn't agree with me that Diana looked menacing. He just smirked.

  "So the warlock's got a witch buddy," he said. "You're gonna save your pal, bitch? That's cute. That's really cute. So what, you're gonna turn me into a frog? Huh? Are you?"

  Diana grinned mirthlessly.

  "You might look sexier that way, but we don't really do that sort of thing anymore."

  "So what's it you do these days? Aside from fucking up the planet?"

  Diana lifted a hand. Something shiny stuck out from under her fingers. With a metallic sound, a sharp blade snapped out from it. Diana pointed at the furball with the switchblade.

  "I could neuter you," she suggested sweetly.  "I'm sure the gene pool can do without you."

  The furball laughed harshly.

  "Oh, I'm shaking in my bones! That's not a weapon, that's a fucking _toothpick! Get over here and __die, bitch!"_

  He rushed her, and then things started happening very quickly.

  The furball ran at Diana so quickly that he practically became a blur to my sight, but Diana was just as fast. As he got within her reach, she jumped into the air – at least two or three feet, from standstill – and kicked the furball in the stomach. He grunted and slowed down for a second – or more like a fraction of a second; I'm telling you, this happened _quickly – and Diana used the momentum gained by the kick to throw herself backwards, away from him._

  The furball, seemingly completely unaffected by being kicked in the gut by a cyborg, kept going and slammed his fist into the place where Diana had been a moment ago. By then she had slipped to the side, so his punch struck the wall instead. There was a crash of breaking wood, and the furball ended up with his arm in the wall up to the elbow.

  I stared. I had experienced firsthand how powerful those muscles were, but this was something else. _No one was that bloody strong!_

  Apparently the furball was. He tore his arm loose, gave off a roar that didn't sound the least bit human, and ran after Diana into the living-room. I could hear them fighting in there; quick breaths, gasps of pain, shouts of anger, sounds of furniture breaking. Meanwhile, I was still lying where the furball had dropped me.

  _I have to get up, I tried telling myself. __Diana can't fight that__! He's as strong and fast as she is. Even more, maybe. And she isn't exactly in peak condition; she used those implants of hers only a few hours ago, and that knocked her out. It'll be even worse this time, and it'll happen soon__. She's dead meat. And a moment after she stops keeping his attention, I'm__ dead meat. I've got to get up! I've got to do something!_

  Slowly, my body started to co-operate. First my hands agreed to push against the floor. Then my legs gave in to my demands that they provide some lifting power. Finally, I managed to stand up straight, if so a bit unsteadily.

  _Good. Good. Now move,__ you idiot! You don't have time to be weak!_

  I moved, staggering through the room. I felt cold and tired and wanted nothing more than to fall asleep and be rid of this nightmare. In retrospect, I suppose I was in shock. Right then, though, it just felt like I had had enough and more than enough of violence and danger, and I wanted it all to stop. A childish urge, and irrational, but I wasn't really at my logical best at the time.

  I managed to get out and into the living room. It was a wreck; Diana and the furball hadn't really been kind to it. There was hardly an undamaged piece of furniture in the room, and technological gadgets were spread all over the floor, most of them broken. Diana's intricate web of equipment, the one that was supposed to act as a beacon, had been shattered.

  The furball was driving Diana through the room, aiming wild swings with his great fists. Diana dodged every one of them, but I could see that she was getting slower. Her feet weren't as steady as they had been a moment ago, and every time she jumped out of the way for a punch, she ran the hazard of slipping, falling and dying. Her face was frozen in an expression of desperate hatred.

  The furball, in comparison, looked as fresh as a daisy, and judging from his wide grin and the gleam in his eyes, he was enjoying himself. He was killing a witch. He was doing Mother Earth's good work. There is nothing better than doing a job you love.

  He was wounded – I could see bloodstains on his chest and his arms – but he hardly seemed to notice.

  Groaning as I bent down, I picked up half a table, lifting it awkwardly. A weapon was a weapon, and I had already proven that I couldn't wrestle this guy empty-handed. On consideration, I broke a thick leg off of the table, making myself an improvised club. I grasped it in both hands. It felt comfortably heavy.

  Neither Diana nor the furball seemed to have noticed me, or at least not considered me worthy of note. They were busy with each other, after all; even the furball wasn't so superior that he could afford to make a mistake. I took full advantage of this as I slammed the table leg into the back of his head.

  I could hear his skull crack, and blood and bone splinters spilled out over the top of my weapon. The furball roared, staggering forward towards Diana, who gracefully stepped out of the way. For a moment, I was sure he was going to fall.

  Then the wound stopped bleeding. And then it seemed to _bubble, like something was moving just under the surface. In a second, it had resumed its earlier, healthy form. There was still blood in the furball's long hair, and I could see something brighter and gooier that I thought must be brain tissue, but the wound had just… closed._

  He smiled as he turned around.

  "Oooooh, the monkey's got a stick," he mocked. "Well, it's gonna take hell of a lot more than that to do me in, monkey-boy."

  Well, I had known that already. _Silver and not much else. But what bloody choice did I have? I swung the club again._

  This time he caught it as it came towards him and tore it out of my grip. He looked at it for a second, and then broke it in two. He didn't even use his knee for support; he just took the thick length of wood in both hands and twisted. He hardly seemed to put any effort into it, but the table leg broke apart in the middle anyway. The furball threw the pieces over his shoulders, not taking his eyes off me.

  "A lot more," he repeated and took a slow step towards me. He was still grinning, enjoying himself. Then, suddenly, the grin faded. "Hey. Where did that bitch go?"

  I looked around. Diana was nowhere in sight. She must have gotten out while I had stood dumbstruck. Very sensible of her, by all means. No use in _both of us dying horribly. But speaking as the one who __was going to die horribly, I felt a little disappointed._

  "Away," I said offhandedly. "She'll be back, though. And if you hurt me, well… you won't see her coming. You won't know she's there until she cuts your throat with a silver version of that knife she's got. On the other hand, if we were to just part ways peacefully here…"

  I hadn't really expected anything out of the attempt – I had just felt that I'd be damned if I was going to do anything except go down fighting. Therefore, I wasn't too surprised when the furball snorted.

  "You fucking warlocks think you're so smart. Think you can go and piss on the laws of nature and get away with it. Well, think again, asshole!"

  He lifted me off my feet again, in the cloth of my shirt this time. As far as I was concerned, that just meant that I got about half as much air as I needed instead of being fully choked. I gave off a wordless scream of equal parts rage and fear and clawed feebly at the powerful arm that was holding me suspended. Somehow, I managed to make a row of four bloody gashes with my well-manicured nails – and saw them close up a second later. I couldn't even hurt him that much.

  He pulled back his other hand, clenched into a fist. It was clear that he was going to hit me. It was also clear that once he did, my head was most likely going to fly off.

  "_Damn you!" I gasped helplessly. He didn't answer._

  Suddenly, colours were flashing all around me. For a confused moment I thought that he had hit me, and that I was now walking towards that light at the end of the tunnel, except people had neglected to tell me that it was more of a neon sign. Then I realised what was going on. All the windows – well, screens designed to look like windows – were suddenly showing swirling patterns of shapes and colours. I recognised the makeup a moment before I heard Diana's voice confirm my memory.

  "Look at the colours," she said, "and be still."

  The furball's hand went limp. For the second time that day I dropped to the floor. This time I had the presence of mind to crawl backwards and away from the furball, who didn't seem to notice me. His eyes were locked on one of the screens.

  I couldn't help glancing at the screens myself, but I didn't feel at all like I had when Diana had used this technique on me. The patterns were made to affect a different sort of mind; mine, it seemed, was not affected.

  I felt pretty good about not having the same sort of mind as this maniac, to be honest…

  Diana came out of her bedroom, knife ready in her hand. She frowned at the frozen shape of the furball.

  "Bastard!" she said with feeling.

  "Quite," I mumbled. "What are we going to do now?"

  "First of all I'm going to cut this self-appointed saviour of the world where he won't regenerate," Diana said grimly. "Then we're going to put him somewhere downstairs, where we don't have to look at him all the time. And then I suppose we'll have to go out and try to find some new components, because these ones are beyond saving." She looked down at the wreckage of her beacon. "Damn!"

  "I agree with you there." I rubbed my throat. It was still aching. "I don't think… that I have ever met anyone who… who hated me so much. And he didn't even know me."

  Diana looked at me for a moment, her face tired. Then she smiled, that wide, teasing grin that I had come to know and love. It made her look like herself again.

  "I can't imagine anyone who knows you can hate you, Simon. You can probably win anyone over."

  My ears were ringing, I noticed. I hoped I wasn't going to pass out. It would be so dreadfully embarrassing, especially considering that I was the one who had been rescued here. Twice, even. The way I saw it, I was already behind.

  "Why, thank you," I said. "Have I won you over?"

  Diana hesitated, then sighed.

  "I suppose you have," she said. To my surprise, she almost looked vulnerable, saying that. Defeating a werewolf, apparently, was one thing. Talking seriously about feelings was quite another.

  "No more suspicions that I'm Patrick?"

  She smiled again.

  "You came out here to help me, but all you did was distract the furball for a moment, and that could have gotten you killed. Patrick Farson would either have run away or found some more efficient way of helping me."

  "So I'm well-meaning and helpless instead of selfish and competent?" I said, raising an eyebrow. Diana laughed.

  "There are worse things. And I wouldn't call not being as good at fighting as a furball incompetence. Fighting is what furballs _do."_

  I shook my head to clear it, but the ringing in my ears just got louder. Now I thought I heard words in it. That worried me even more. I hadn't been without oxygen for long enough to take brain damage, had I?

  "Is Patrick a mage?" I asked. "Can you tell me that much, at least? Is he Empowered?"

  "Empowered? Definitely." She grimaced. "A mage? Er… that depends on what you mean by that. I'll explain later, okay?"

  _… raate mochta doreth morene, karem dior rech morene… the voice in my ears said. Nonsense-words, spoken in a chanting, half-singing tone. I was starting to feel distinctly uncomfortable. Was I losing it? Had this whole thing gone too far for my humble mind to take it anymore, and now I was losing it?_

  "Do you hear that?" I said, closing my eyes and rubbing my forehead.

  "Hear what?" Diana said.

  Wonderful. Maybe I was having a stroke or something. What a way to go – survive an attack from a monster and then die from pure excitement…

_  … dior m'mene sathe mochta, siar __kan__ dheros valan do'llore…_

  "Like someone chanting. It's like he's standing right next to me. Are you _sure you can't hear anything?" I could detect a hint of pleading in my voice._

  "No, I…" She paused. Her eyes went wide. "Oh, _shit!" she said. "Not __now…"_

  "What?" I said.

  Then the world disappeared.

I was falling; that was the general feeling. Falling very quickly, in complete darkness. I knew I had a body, because I could feel the chill of the wind sweeping around me. It felt as if it was going to turn my blood into ice. What I didn't seem to have was eyes and ears. I was a bundle of terrified self-awareness plummeting through spaces not of this world, and that was all.

  And yet, even now my Empowered mind couldn't stop its demands to know everything. _Why? it cried as I fell. __How? Where? Who? Tell me!_

  I hung on to that. If I couldn't get any answers, it was at least a comfort to have the questions. It meant that I was still myself.

  Then, without warning, the light returned. I got a confused impression of colours as I fell to the floor. In retrospect, I suppose I just lost my balance at the surprise of standing, but right then, it felt like the completion of my earlier, longer fall.

  My face hit floor boards. With my newly-regained vision, I could see every line in those right next to me. They were beautifully mundane and normal. Floor boards I didn't have a problem with. You knew where you stood with floor boards.

  I had gotten hearing back, too. I could hear a scream of rage close by. The voice was deep and rough, and didn't sound completely human.

  "Mother of God!" another voice yelped. This one was high-pitched with fear and sounded as human as you could ask for.

  It seemed to be a great sacrifice for me to raise my head and look around. It had been peaceful, lying there and staring at the floor.

  I was still in Diana's apartment; that was my first impression. The shape of the room was the same, so was the jumble of computer entrails and strange devices lying everywhere. But all the furniture was whole again, as by… well, as by magic. And after a second or so, I realised that it wasn't _quite as much machinery lying around – just as much as could be expected from a woman with a passionate interest in computer mechanics and an equally passionate disinterest in housekeeping. And there was a ring of chalk-drawn signs on the floor._

  Diana was getting to her feet a short distance away from me, the knife still in her hand. On the far side of the rune-circle, over by the window, a man I hadn't seen before stood. He was about my age, tall and slim, with a delicately handsome face framed by golden-blonde locks. He was dressed in long, purple robe and held a thin wooden stick, and a heavy silver chain hung around his neck.

  The furball was standing in the middle of the rune-circle. The position perfectly matched the place he had been standing in the Secondary version of the apartment, and that was the only thing that allowed me to recognise him. He didn't even look remotely human anymore.

  It was a little bit like a bear, along with a great deal of wolf, some human, and a bit of nightmare thrown in for salt. Whatever it was, it was _large, its pointed ears touching the ceiling, and it was roaring in fury. And its claws were thick and sharp._

  "_Kill… __you… __all…" the furball grunted, forming the words with great difficulty, using a mouth that had never been intended for speaking._

  Diana threw her knife at him, aiming for one of the yellow-gleaming eyes. He swatted the blade aside like a fly and ran towards her, but then Diana wasn't there anymore. She had ran behind the table whose Secondary twin I had broken apart for a weapon, and was starting to throw everything she could find on it at the monster.

  The robed man had dropped his staff and dived for a bag that was lying on the floor, and was now rummaging through it. He looked scared, but it was a controlled fear. That was more than I could say for myself. The very sight of the furball in his full feral glory seemed to shake me to the core of my being. I had seen this sight, it seemed to me, in a thousand nightmares, all of which I had forgotten upon awakening. It was Death come to get me.

  The furball threw the table to the side, leaving Diana without cover. She tried to jump to the side, but a great paw struck into her side as she did, throwing her to the floor with a cry of pain. The furball took the one step that separated them and raised its paws for the killing strike.

  A loud bang, almost deafening in the small space of the room, was heard from right next to me. The furball shuddered and staggered forward as a dark spot suddenly bloomed out on the fur on his back. Another bang, and the flesh of his upper left arm was torn asunder by some unseen force.

  I turned my head. The robed man was holding a large, black gun in a two-hand grip that looked very professional. As I watched, he fired again. This time, the back of the furball's neck seemed to all but explode, spraying thick, red liquid over the floor.

  I felt faint. Blood. Oh, I really did hate the sight of blood…

  The furball changed again, but not back into a man. Instead, all in his form that reminded of a human being disappeared, and he sank down on four legs, shrinking as he did. The werewolf was turning into a wolf.

  For a moment I wondered what help he meant that to be. Then I realised that he didn't mean for it to do anything. It was just that whatever magick allowed him to take on a different form was dying along with him. The wolf collapsed on the floor, not the least bit monstrous and very dead.

  There was a moment of silence.

  Then the robed man gave off an exasperated sigh and shook his head.

  "Really," he said. His voice was light, but when he spoke calmly it sounded clear and pleasant. "That was _most unpleasant, though all those money I put into buying silver bullets no longer seem like such a waste, which is always nice. Are you all right, Diana?"_

  "I, I, I think so…" Diana said and tried to get to her feet. About halfway up, she got a strange expression on her face and dropped to the floor again, her eyes closing before she had even stopped moving.

  The robed man sighed again.

  "I guess not," he said tiredly. He turned to me. "Look, you're larger than I am. Would you care to get her to her bed?"

  I walked over to Diana and picked her up. She was surprisingly heavy. Maybe it was because of all that metal she carried around inside of her.

  "She's bleeding," I noted. There were four gashes in Diana's white dress, and the cloth around them was turning red.

  The man grimaced.

  "Blast. Then he must have hit her harder than I thought." He stepped closer and unceremoniously lengthened one of the gashes enough that he could get a good look at what was under it. After a second, he smiled, relieved. "Just scratches, really. We should probably clean them up, though. Who knows where those claws have been?"

  He went to find some disinfectant, while I carried Diana into her bedroom and gently put her down on the bed. In Primary, the sheets were indeed black.

  I sat down at the side of the bed and allowed myself a moment to enjoy the feeling of being in my own dimension again. And of being alive, of course. I had doubted that I would stay that way for much longer, but somehow, things had worked out all the same. That was pretty amazing, to be honest.

  Now, of course, Diana had fainted – again – and left me alone with some mage of whom I knew little except that he was armed and dangerous, but it was still a huge improvement. And the guy had been friendly enough. It would have been nice to think that any friend of Diana's would be a friend of mine, but Diana had already as much as revealed that she had some friends who would not at all approve of her having been overly helpful to me.

  I glanced out the window. The sun was rising. I had only been gone one night, then. It felt like forever.

  And why shouldn't it? I was a different man than I had been when I left. I could now think about someone as a "mage" without using it as a figure of speech. I was home, true, but home was not the place I had always assumed it was.

  And I wasn't the person I had always assumed I was. I was a mage. Apparently. Though of course, I had yet to see any proof of that. Diana appearing while I was being killed by the furball was not unlikely enough that it deserved an arcane explanation.

  I glanced at Diana's bunny-free sheets and smiled. At a certain plane of existence, they looked different. Shouldn't it be very easy to make them that way here, too?

  I waved my hand in the air.

  "Alakazam?" I said hopefully.

  Nothing happened, but I hadn't really expected anything to happen, either. That wouldn't do. The world was shaped through belief, Diana had told me. I had to _believe._

  "Alakazam!" I commanded, demanding obedience of those sheets with every fibre of my being.

  Again, nothing happened. I sighed. Presumably there was some kind of trick to it. Empowered arrogance alone couldn't change the world.

  "What on _earth are you doing?" the robed man said. He was standing in the doorway, though I had not heard him approach. He was holding a plastic bottle in one hand and a piece of cloth in the other._

  I willed myself not to blush.

  "Just… carrying out an experiment in practical magic," I said, making every effort to sound like he was stupid even to ask.

  "I see," he said, not sounding like he thought he was the least bit stupid. He crossed the distance between the door and the bed, knelt down beside it and started to gently clean the gashes in Diana's side. "I'm terribly afraid that I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Kevin Harsh." He glanced at me and smiled. "I don't think I've had the pleasure…?"

  "Simon. Simon Stromberg." I rallied some of my social graces. "Thank you for getting us out of there."

  Even if the timing could have been better – for instance, he might have done it five seconds _after Diana had carved the head off of the furball. Breaking his line of sight to the screen Diana had used to hypnotise it had almost gotten us killed despite it all. But it would be impolite to bring that up, and he __had dealt with the appearance of the furball very efficiently._

  "Oh, think nothing of it," he said. "I owe Diana a few favours."

  "You two go back a long way, then?" I said.

  "Oh, yes." He nodded absently, focused on the work at hand. "We were both members of the Neon Rose for a few years, until the black hats broke it apart. Then we fought together in the battle for New Eden. A dreadful mistake, really. We were lucky to get out of there with our lives. But we stuck together after that too, even if we haven't been members of the same cabal for the last year or so. We overlap each other pretty well. She needs someone to talk sense into her every now and then, and I need someone to shake me out of my own sensibility ever now and then."

  He chuckled, a soft, pleasant sound. I looked at him, with his all-too-beautiful face, and all the history he had with Diana, and the off-handish way he used words and expressions that seemed to come from another world, and in some cases probably _did. A horrible suspicion appeared in my mind. So he and Diana overlapped each other, did they?_

  "I see," I said, trying to keep my dirty mind under control. Okay, so they had known each other for ages and had fought for the same causes and saved each other's lives and done each other favours – that didn't mean anything, did it? They might very well just be friends.

  I presented that theory to my jealousy. My jealousy laughed me in the face.

  "There. That should do it." Kevin picked up the bottle and the rag he had used and walked away with it. I followed him as he put the bottle back in the bathroom cabinet and put the rag on Diana's obviously long-overdue pile of dirty clothes. "I don't think Diana has mentioned you. Which Tradition do you belong to?"

  Tradition. I had heard that word before. It was one of many words I did not know the meaning of.

  "I don't know," I said. "What's a Tradition?"

  Kevin looked startled.

  "You don't know? Good heavens. Diana should really have told you."

  "She was busy," I said. That was not entirely a lie. She _had been busy, but whether or not she would have told me if she hadn't been was very much up to question. "Would you be so kind as to fill in the blanks?"_

  "Well…" Kevin walked into the kitchen and sat down by the table. I took the other chair. "I suppose you could say they're schools of magick. But that's simplifying it a tad too much, I'm afraid. It would perhaps be better to say that they are the _dominant schools of magic. The ones with the most practitioners. Those who got organised."_

  I nodded. That made sense, after a fashion. It was in the nature of people to bang together with others who were like them. I should probably have thought about it myself, but Diana had always seemed so independent that I had never considered that she might be part of any sort of organisation.

  "So which Tradition are you member of?" I said.

  "The Order of Hermes," Kevin said. He smiled proudly. "The oldest and most powerful one."

  "I'm sure," I said politely. "Thus, I take it, the robe, the staff, the runes…?"

  "All part of the ritual," Kevin said with a nod. "Spells of summoning are complicated. And the use of high magick takes a lot of preparations. Otherwise I would have gotten you two home sooner."

  "And Diana?" I said. "Which Tradition is she?"

  "She's a Virtual Adept." He smiled wistfully. "Which is a terrible waste of talent, but when I got to know her they had already gotten their claws too deeply into her for me to get her to see reason."

  "Pardon me for asking," I said carefully, "but why is it such a waste that she uses magick in that way? It works, doesn't it?"

  "I suppose." He shrugged. "But it's like… like making a faulty TV work by kicking it. That works, too, but it's not the most efficient way to do it, and it's not based on any true understanding – it's just using a trick you've realised gets the job done." He smiled. "We, on the other hand, can teach you to repair that TV for good. If you haven't had any formal training, there's much we can do for you."

  I didn't want to say anything, but after having seen Diana's technomancy, Kevin's high magick struck me as somewhat unimpressive. Couldn't you use supernatural forces and still be modern about it? I decided that I would. No more alakazam-ing. I'd ask Diana to tutor me first thing tomorrow.

  "I'll consider it," I said diplomatically.

  "You should do so." He seemed a bit less than hopeful, though. Maybe he was better at seeing through white lies like that than I was at telling them. "So, would you care to tell me how you and Diana ended up in a shadow reality?"

  A shadow reality? That was one way to describe Secondary, certainly.

  "Someone sent us there," I said. "Picked us right out of the restaurant we were eating in and put us in that other place. I don't know who it was. I don't think Diana knows, either."

  "No?" He looked amused. "Never believe Diana when she says she doesn't know, my friend. She always knows more than she wants anyone to suspect. That way, she is free to make dramatic revelations at the right times. In fact, I can think of exactly one person who could have sent you there against your will and without her seeing him do it."

  "You know who it was?" I said, startled. Could it be this easy to de-mask the mysterious 'he'? "Tell me."

  He shook his head.

  "I don't know anything, not for sure. There might be others with the necessary power that I haven't even heard of. And if Diana won't tell you… well, she might have her reasons. I'd rather not have her mad at me." The smile appeared again, sudden and brilliant like light reflected in a gemstone. "She gets _physical when she's mad, and I must admit that I by all accounts punch like a girl."_

  I sighed inwards. In the mages' world, apparently, you got information in bits and pieces, or not at all. I was starting to wish for some sort of instruction manual.

  The sound of someone walking through the living room hinted that Diana was feeling better. Sure enough, a moment later she was standing in the doorway, looking tired and groggy, but smiling weakly for all that.

  "Stop conspiring against me," she said. "I could hear you all the way to the bedroom."

  Kevin made a big show out of looking innocently accused.

  "What, would _we?" he said. "We were just expressing our concern. Anything else is __purely a creation of your overgrown paranoia."_

  "My paranoia is overgrown because it gets fed so often," Diana said with mock-gruffness.

  "Now really, old girl." Kevin smiled teasingly. "Just because everyone is out to get you there's no reason to give them the satisfaction of making you paranoid."

  They laughed together. Every word they exchanged, it seemed to me, had years of mutual trust and affection behind it. They were certainly very comfortable together.

  I hated that.

  The strange thing what, I realised as Diana walked up to us, that there was something similar about her and Kevin. He was as fair as she was dark, as ethereal as she was substantial, as tranquil as she was dynamic… and yet, there _was something there, something in the way they carried themselves. There was a common glow deep within their eyes, the dark-brown and the pale-blue. It was __I-want. It was __I-can. It was __you-can't-stop-me. It was the look of a person who would never, ever let anyone else decide the rules. Both of them had, in their own ways, rejected the life that the world had had in store for them and gone off to look for something else, and that showed._

  _The Empowering, I thought.__ Can they see it in me, too? I think they can. God almighty! One in every thousand people, was that what she said? How is it that the world is still in one piece, with all those millions of Empowered minds in it?_

  "Thanks for helping," Diana said. "Sorry about the furball. I promise that I didn't invite him, he just tagged along anyway."

  Kevin chuckled.

  "I admit that that was a bit of a nasty surprise, but all's well that ends well. And this is one that will at no point storm into Black Moon, yell something about sacrilege and start tearing people apart. Personally, I quite like the idea of him not storming into Black Moon and doing that."

  "Point," Diana agreed.

  "I must be off now, I'm afraid." Kevin walked back out into the living room. Diana was one step after him, and I got up and followed them. He pulled off his robe – he was wearing a very elegant suit underneath it – folded it up and put it into his bag. The silver chain followed it. The staff he took in his hand as a walking-stick. "If you are all right, I do have work that needs be doing. No rest for the wicked."

  "Don't I know it." She looked thoughtful. "Do I have any favour left to call in from you?"

  "One or two, I think."

  "I may need it soon."

  Kevin shrugged and smiled.

  "You know where to find me."

***

After Kevin had left, Diana and I took on the unpleasant duty of cleaning up one dead furball and the assorted mess. To my very great pride, it did not faint once while I wiping the blood off of the floor. I only felt like it.

  "It's lucky, in a way," Diana said. She had put the dead wolf in a big, black, plastic bag and stuffed it in the closet for later disposal. "People are used to hearing strange sounds from my apartment, so that's not so much of a problem, but getting a human corpse out of here would have been bothersome. And he _could have turned into a man when he died. Sometimes they do. Other times, like now, it's wolves. It's like they can't even decide themselves what they are, so when the magick disappears, they just go to whatever they're closest to at the moment." She grimaced. "If they really are mages, then that's just another proof that when you give people the power to be anything they want, some of them are going to want to be __really strange things."_

  "What do _you want to be?" I said. I was wiping the floor clean of Kevin's rune-circle. The crayon he has used was hard to rub off. I supposed that that was deliberate. When all that was standing between you and a demon was a few signs on the floor, you wanted those signs to be drawn to last._

  "I'm not sure yet," Diana admitted. "Efficient as a machine, flexible as a person and passionate as an animal, I suppose."

  "Doesn't sound too bad," I admitted.

  "Thank you. What do _you want to be?"_

  "Don't know," I said. "Not this, that's for sure. I hate being me."

  Diana smiled.

  "That's narrowing it down a little, I suppose." She stood back and surveyed her work. "I suppose nothing is messier than usual now." She looked down on herself and laughed. "Except for myself, that is. I've completely ruined my favourite dress, and I'm all sticky. I'm going to take a shower. Be with you in half an hour or so."

  She went into the bathroom, and a few seconds later, I heard the shower go on. I did my very best not to think about the fact that all that was between me and a naked Diana right now as a door that – I had not been able to help notice – she had not bothered to lock. I concentrated at wiping the floor, and that helped. Few things are less arousing than housekeeping.

  _She did say she was falling in love with me, I thought. __And I got the feeling that that's not a common thing for her. Even if she and Kevin are an item, it doesn't mean I don't stand a chance._

  Unfortunately, while she _had indeed said that, the conclusions I had drawn about her character were all my own. She found her feelings for me upsetting. Very well. But that might have been because she was already in a relationship, a very __long-term relationship, and that they meant trouble for her. She might not be the least bit inclined to act on them, for the same reason._

  _She's never mentioned him, I told myself. __And she did go out with me._

_  On the other hand, she never mentioned a lot of things about herself, and she was__ assigned to watch over me by those friends of hers. Come to think about it, that's another mystery right there, and it's probably got something to do with Patrick, but never mind all that right now… __The point is that she might have decided that she should get to know me up close and personal, that that would help her figure out who I was and what I was doing._

  I had an intense desire to track Kevin down and strangle him, but the man did carry a gun and had proved very skilled at using it. And then there was the fact of his powers. I had no _idea what he might be capable of. Opening a gateway between different dimensions was hardly a parlour trick, for starters._

  Besides, someone who got nauseous at the sight of violence should probably not plot to kill people.

  _Okay, so just ask__ her, a sensible-sounding part of me suggested. __You might just be imagining things. If he's her boyfriend or whatever, it should be easy enough to find out._

  True enough – once I gathered up the courage to ask. It was ironic, really, that after all the questions I had asked her, something as mundane as this could be so infuriatingly difficult. The universe apparently had a sense of humour. Stupid universe.

  Something in the bedroom went _bleep._

  I slowly put the rag I had been using to scrub the runes away back in the bucket. If I was not completely mistaken, that was the sound of a computer starting up, and since there was no one in there to make it do that, the only conclusion was that it was doing it on its own. And that, in turn, meant that it was time for another one of those surreal ghost-in-the-machine situations.

  I supposed that there was no sense in prolonging the inevitable, so I got up and walked into the room.

  The computer screen was lit, and the operative system was just starting up. As I watched, a window opened and a line of text appeared in it.

  _I'm glad to see you took my advice._

  "Your advice?" I said.

  _You asked her out._

  I relaxed. This was the matchmaker, not 'him'.

  "Yes, and we got hijacked into a parallel dimension and almost killed several times over," I pointed out.

  _It was a first date to remember, then?_

  I snorted with laughter. You could look at it like that, certainly.

  "Who are you?" I said, without hoping too much for a response. I had learned much in Secondary, but now that I was back, most of the mysteries of my life were still waiting for me. Patrick. 'He'. And this fellow, who seemed to be very concerned about my sex-life. That was of course very touching and all, but I could really not see that it was any of his business. Or her business… or its business… or whatever it might be…

  _That's not important._

  "I beg to differ," I said. "If you're going to get involved in my life, who you are is very important to me." I paused, waiting for an answer to that. None came; apparently, my matchmaker friend was not going to dignify that with a response. "All right, so what _is important?"_

  _You going__ to her right now._

  Had I had anything in my mouth at the time, I would probably have choked on it in pure surprise. As it was, I didn't – but for a moment, it felt like I was choking on the air itself.

  "She's in the shower!" I gasped.

  _Yes, but it's a big and roomy shower, the text on the screen said temptingly.__ Plenty of space for two._

  "She'd kill me if I tried that," I said flatly. "She'd take that switchblade she carries around and she'd cut my throat. _Eventually she'd cut my throat. Before she got that far, she'd cut some __other things!"_

  This did apparently not bother the matchmaker. Maybe he was trying to kill me too. Maybe he just took some sort of perverse pleasure in getting my hormones to do the job for him. Because part of me wanting him to convince me that he was right. Wanted that very much, in fact. Wanted it enough to convince the _rest of me to become convinced, in fact._

  _If the roles were reversed, he argued, __would you kill _her_?_

  "Well, no," I said. "But that's different."

  _Why?_

  I was starting to have some difficulty remembering why. It had something to do with gender roles, I felt sure, but I was in no condition to formulate the principle. Far too much of my imagination was otherwise occupied.

  _Go on, the matchmaker prodded me. __Do it… you know you want to…_

  "I hate you," I said. "You know that, Mister Mystery? I really, deeply, sincerely hate you. It is my profound belief that you are evil incarnate."

  _But you will do as I said?_

  "Yes!"

  _Good, the screen wrote. Then the computer shut itself off, without more of a detectable cause than it had had for starting up. I glared at the dark screen for a moment. Then I took a deep breath and started walking._

  _I'm an idiot, I thought matter-of-factly as I walked, my head spinning. __I'm a dead idiot. I am thirty-three years old, and still I'm acting like a teenager. An idiot teenager. It must be the whole Empowering thing. It became too much for my poor, dumb brain. It's short-circuited. That's the only explanation._

  I opened the bathroom door. It was hot and steamy inside. I could see Diana's shape inside the rectangular shower-booth (which was indeed very roomy), her hands over her head to rub into her hair some of all the things women apparently feel that they need to subject their innocent hair to. I gulped. The glass was tilted, making it possible to see only the vague outline of who was inside, but it was a very nice outline indeed.

  _What do cyborg technomancers do with men who they think is about to try and rape them? I wondered as I took my clothes off. __Something exceedingly nasty, no doubt.__ I wonder if one of those adrenalin-rushes would make her strong enough to dismember me with her bare hands? Probably. Oh, this is really a bad idea, I should give this up right now__ while I still have the chance…_

  I didn't, though, of course. For someone who supposedly could control the very stuff of reality, I had extremely poor control over myself. On the plus side, Diana had not yet screamed and ordered me to get out of there _right now or suffer the consequences. That had to mean something. She had to have realised I was in the room by now. Right?_

  I took another deep breath, enjoying it extra much since it might be one of my last, and opened the door to the booth.

  Diana turned her head and grinned at me through the stream of water running down her face. Last time I had seen that grin, it had been on a statue in Secondary.

  "That sure took you long enough," she said.

  For a day that started with me almost being killed by a monster, it turned out quite pleasant in the end, really…


	6. The Technocracy

_DISCLAIMER: The world isn't mine, the characters are, and so on and so forth, you know how it goes by now._

_Okay. I suppose that none of you really saw this coming? You expected chapter seven, and instead you're getting a new chapter six. Well, if it's any consolation to you, it kind of surprised me too… =]_

_I did start writing chapter seven. I got a fair distance into it, and then realised that I was bored. Bored, bored, bored. Bored to tears. Bored out of my skull. I hated my plot, I hated my dialogue, I hated my character development, and what had so far been a story I had been rather proud of was suddenly just lots of words on the screen, without any real context to them._

_So I thought back and tried to figure out where I had lost the thread of the story, where I had last liked what I had written… and to my despair, I realised that that had been at the end of chapter five. Everything since then was pure crap._

_There is an explanation for that, actually._

_See, Reign of Conformity_ started with me reading the _Mage_ rulebook and trying to explain to myself how Consensual Reality, and all its consequences, worked. Before I knew it, my explaining "voice" took on a life of its own and became Diana, and the person she was explaining to became the newly Awakened Simon. And since I liked both those characters, I started writing their story. It was meant as something rather modest, maybe 15.000 words or so. As you have seen, it became a lot longer… and because of that, and because of my inability to write at any given story for any longer amount of time, it also _took __a lot longer._

_Meaning, I had a lot of time to think about the Diana-explaining-it-all scene._

_A lot of time to build upon it.___

_A lot of time to form it completely in my head.___

_A lot of time to freeze it solid.___

_Therefore, when I actually sat down to write the chapter in which Diana first meets Patrick Farson and then, having realised who Simon really__ is, explains to him about the Technocracy, I was essentially writing from memory. I had made everything up in advance, leaving nothing to the whim of the moment. Seeing as most of my readers are probably writers themselves, I don't think I need to explain just how inadvisable that is._

_The result: pure crap which threw the story into a direction of more pure crap._

_Therefore, I apologise for the inconvenience, but I must hereby declare all of chapter six as you have read it invalid. What follows is the real__ version, which will be followed by the real__ chapter seven. I personally think that this version is superior. I hope you will all agree._

_Now then, going back to Simon and Diana in her apartment, Saturday night…_

Even the best of days, however, must eventually end.

It had started going dark outside of Diana's window when she got out of bed and started getting dressed. I remained under the cover, supporting my head on my elbow, and watching her. Just watching her, every move she made, every shadow passing over her smooth, brown skin. I couldn't seem to get an amazed smile off of my face. I _felt amazed. I didn't think I had ever felt so… so _good_. Not just content, or at peace, or satisfied, but _good_, like the world was a nice place to live and my life was a nice life to have. Like everything… was _right_._

"I really like you, you know," I said matter-of-factly.

Diana grinned at me as she pulled on a pair of black jeans. She didn't move with more grace than one would expect, I noticed with interest. I had seen her somersaulting around a room, keeping out of the way of an insane monster, every motion in perfect control. Now, she was just a woman who had kept reasonably fit, but who didn't get all that much exercise and had left her physical peak behind some years ago. Without her implants triggered, she was just… a person.

Somehow, that didn't lessen the feeling of awe. It increased it. If you met a goddess, you would expect her to be fantastic. Meeting another human being who was fantastic – that was a _true_ miracle.

"Right back at you," she said. I couldn't quite suppress a sigh when she pulled a black sweater on. I had enjoyed the view. "Now get up, you lazy lug. We have things to do."

I groaned theatrically.

"No rest for the wicked, is that it?"

"Pretty much, except that we're not wicked," Diana said. She walked down to the foot of the bed and pulled the cover off of me. A great deal of my snugly warmth disappeared along with it. "We're the good guys. And there's far too few of us, so we have to work overtime."

"I'm used to _that, at least," I sighed. Diana watched me with a sly little grin on her face as I got up. Apparently, she _also _liked the view. That thought made me feel very manly._

"You're stuck with yesterday's clothes, I'm afraid," she said and tossed me a bundle of cloth which, upon further inspection, proved to be my suit. "Nothing I've got would fit you."

"That's okay." I started getting dressed, but stopped and looked at my shirt. There was nothing very wrong with it, but it didn't smell very nice – a lot of the things I had been doing while wearing it had been of the kind that caused perspiration. "This shirt is dirty. That's reality."

"Can't argue with that," Diana admitted amiably.

"But reality is subjective," I mused. "So if I don't choose to see this shirt as dirty…" I closed my eyes. "It's a fresh shirt, straight from the cleaners. This is the reality I want. When I open my eyes, it will be the reality I find."

I took a deep breath, and opened my eyes.

The shirt had still obviously been worn for a great many hours since its last wash. Diana watched me, her hand in front of her mouth to hide a smirk. I wrinkled my brow.

"Why doesn't it work when I do that? According to that explanation you gave me, it should."

"Yes, Simon," Diana said. "If it was that simple, it would. It's not, though. If I made it sound like that, it was because I wanted to bring the point across. Magick, like everything else that's worth doing, is difficult and tricky."

I nodded slowly. That made sense, I supposed. If it was _simple_, everyone would be doing it.

"What am I doing wrong?" I said humbly.

Diana hesitated, looking thoughtful.

"For starters," she said, "you just want the shirt to be clean. You don't think about _how it would get clean. In fact, you don't really know what it __means for it to be clean. What is it about it that makes it dirty? What has to be removed and added for it to suit your definition of what a clean shirt is like?"_

"I'm wishing instead of doing," I said.

Diana laughed in surprise and nodded eagerly.

"Yes! That's it exactly. Never wish. Always do. That's what magick is all about. What the _Empowering is all about. There is always a way to do everything, but you have to first figure out what it is and then do it. Everything is possible, but nothing is simple…"_

"… and some things are bloody stupid?" I finished, raising an eyebrow. I had thought that comment was cryptic at the time, but now, it was starting to make a surprising amount of sense.

"Exactly. You're starting to get it."

For lack of magickal solutions, I put on the shirt. It really didn't feel that bad. I'm usually a bit of a fanatic when it comes to wearing clean clothes, but putting on something you wore yesterday has a certain merit to it. It's very comfortable. The cloth and your skin have had time to get to understand each other.

"Could _you clean a shirt by magick?" I said, out of curiosity. Diana shook her head._

"I wouldn't know where to start. Though if you wearing something clean was a matter of life and death, I guess I do have a gadget or two that would be able to pluck a clean shirt from your own wardrobe." She grinned. "Don't even bother to ask, though. It would be very difficult and risky for me to do that. Spacetime doesn't go easy on people making mistakes while meddling with it."

"Don't worry," I said. "I promise to not start regarding you as a viable alternative to the subway."

She laughed.

"Thank you kindly. Are you up for some breakfast?"

"Dinner," I corrected. "We've missed breakfast. And lunch."

"That's true." She grinned wryly. "I guess that means I'm entitled to three meals in a row now."

"You'll burst," I said flatly.

"No, I won't." She smiled smugly. "My digestion process works _very _quickly when I want it to, for some reason."

"Oh, _that is worth using magick for?" I grumbled as Diana strode off to the kitchen. _

A few minutes later, I was enjoying a cup of coffee and sandwich, while Diana had gotten through the breakfast part of her meal-trilogy and was currently heating something plastic-wrapped in the microwave.

"So," I said. "I take it you have some plans for the night?"

"Oh, yes." She grinned, somewhat unpleasantly. "I'm going to track 'him' down and break his worthless neck. I'm afraid you'll have to tag along, because I can't risk 'him' going for you while I'm gone."

"Oh, I don't mind." I smiled faintly. "It might surprise you to hear this, but I don't really find your company overly burdensome."

She chuckled. It was hard to tell with her dark skin, but I think that she was blushing. Which was a rather un-Diana-like thing to do, come to think of it.

"I'm glad you think so," she said loftily.

"Out of curiosity," I said, "where do we start?"

"Well…" She looked thoughtful. "Dougal has a lot of mages living in it, for a city of its size, but it's still not _that_ many. And the ability to meddle with dimensions on the scale 'he' can is rare. We can eliminate the number of suspects that way."

"And…?"

"Well, there's Kevin, to start with." She smiled distantly. "I would like to think that he wouldn't betray me. We share a bit too much history for that."

I realised that somehow, someway, Kevin Harsh simply had to go. There had to be some means of getting rid of him. The man summoned demons and shot werewolves, for God's sakes. He had to have done _something_ I could turn him over to the police for…

"There was a woman named Jennifer Deerheart who was fond of summonings and bindings," Diana went on. "She's dead now, though. Or at least I hope so." She scowled. "That woman was nothing else than bad news in a designer dress…"

"So if she is alive, she might just be 'him'?" I said.

"Yes, though she was never too fond of computers." Diana wrinkled her brow. "I can't really picture her using yours as a medium to send a creature through. She always made fun of how dependent she thought I was on technology. 'How hard you try to escape the understanding of your own flesh', I think she said."

I rolled my eyes. Charming girl. I was starting to see why Diana hadn't liked her much.

"So who knows how to do it, and would do it in that specific way?" I said.

The microwave gave off a short _ping. Diana took out her meal, placed it in front of her seat at the table and dug in at it with knife and fork._

"To the best of my knowledge," she admitted, "only one person." She sighed. "Though I hate to think it's him. I've never really liked him, or vice versa, but I thought we had decided to keep things civil."

"Well, let's go have a talk with him, then," I suggested.

"That will be a little difficult in itself…" Diana said, and then broke off as the doorbell rang.

"I'll get it," I said and got up from my chair. "Are you expecting someone?"

"Nope," Diana said as she cheerfully impaled something that was presumably meat on her fork. "Probably just some neighbour who wants to complain about the ruckus this morning. They do that a lot."

"Ever considered not making so much ruckus at strange hours?" I said as I went for the door.

"What? And give up my godgiven right to listen to King Crimson at four in the morning? Really, Simon."

"Silly me," I mumbled and opened the door.

My jaw dropped as I saw who stood outside of it, a dark look on his face.

"And just where have you been?" Patrick growled.

I didn't mean to, but as Patrick stepped over the threshold, I backed away to let him in. I can't even blame his strange control over me, because that only manifested in spoken commands; this was sheer cowardice. In my defence, I daresay most people would have done the same. Patrick seemed to push me back through pure force of personality.

It wasn't just the fact that he looked like he expected everything his gaze fell upon to catch fire. It certainly wasn't his imposing physical built – I have the exact same built, after all. If anything, I think it was his unflinching certainty that I _would get out of his way. The human mind is a fragile thing that way. It's so uncertain about most things that it easily assumes that someone who _is_ certain must be right._

"I asked you a _question," he snarled._

"Here," I said. "I've been here." From somewhere, I summoned a bit of backbone. "What business is it of yours, anyway?"

"Don't. Talk. Back. To me."

I had thought I had seen Patrick angry. In fact, I hadn't thought I had ever seen him in any state _but anger. All of creation angered Patrick by its pure imperfection. And last time I had seen him, I had demanded answers from him that he had not been ready to give. I had thought that he could not possible be more furious than he had been then._

I had been wrong. This was far, far worse than that time. He was positively glowing with directed outrage. It was a glorious thing to behold, in a way – much like, I imagine, it would be a glorious thing to see fire rain from the sky. However, I was in no position to admire it. To continue the comparison, my position was rather like actually _living in Gomorrah._

"You weren't here last night," he said, every word hammered into my ears by the full force of Patrick's righteous fury. "I checked. You weren't here when I checked again early this morning. You got here somewhere during the day. **Tell me when**."

I tried to resist it. God help me, I tried. But it was like trying to flex a muscle in an amputated limb. There was just nothing in me that I could place in his way.

"Sometime before dawn…" I said uncertainly. "Five, maybe…"

"Huh. I almost caught you, then." He grimaced. "Doesn't matter. I want to know where you were until then."

"None of your business," I said hoarsely. "Where the _hell_ do you get off to, coming here and…"

He hit me. His fist seemed to come out of nowhere and striking me between the eyes. I staggered backwards, explosions of light and colour appearing in my field of vision. I didn't feel any pain yet, just the realisation that in a few seconds, my nerves would catch up, and there _would_ be pain. I struggled to remain standing, but it was in vain; all I managed was to land in sitting instead of lying position.

_Then the pain struck me, and I thought I was going to pass out. My head felt like it was going to explode. I looked up, hurt and disoriented, and saw Patrick's eyes look down at me. I looked into them, and…_

Yes. There it was, sure enough. _I-want.__ I-can. You-can't-stop-me. The gleam of the Empowering. The fire of magick._

Patrick was a mage.

I thought I could see something else in his eyes and his face, too, along with the anger. Though _that had to be my muddled state deceiving me. For surely, Patrick couldn't be __afraid…?_

"Shut up with your nonsense," he snarled. "Answer my questions, but otherwise shut up."

"Why don't you make me?" I gasped. I pressed my hands against my forehead, like I was trying to keep my head together that way. "Why don't you make your voice go spooky and just _make me?"_

He smiled thinly.

"It's not quite as simple as that." He bent down and grabbed my chin between two fingers. His grip was like a vice. "Not that it matters. You will do as I say _because I say it_, not because you're forced to. Do you understand me? You will do as I say, or I will _break_ you."

"Doctor Farson, I presume?"

Patrick straightened up, letting go of my chin. I looked around and saw Diana standing in the kitchen door. I hadn't heard her move.

She looked strangely small next to Patrick. I had seen her fight a ten-foot monstrosity that healed wounds five seconds after it received them, but I had never seen her look this much like an insect that someone was about to step on. From the look on her face, though, she meant to fight to the death regardless of the odds.

"And who are _you?" Patrick said with disgust. Then he did something strange; he pulled a pair of shades out of his jacket pocket and held them in front of his eyes for a second. Then he grimaced as he put them back in his pocket. "Deviant."_

He made it sound like the most distasteful word imaginable. Diana, however, grinned smugly.

"I do my best."

"You're the one who's tampered with this specimen."

_This specimen?_ some lingering trace of self-respect said with a raised eyebrow. _Excuse me? This specimen? Patrick, you bastard, if I get half a chance you'll get to know what it feels like to be strangled by a specimen…_

"I guess you can say that," Diana said. "I didn't do anything he didn't approve of, though."

"Anything _he didn't approve of?" Patrick took a few long steps past me, placing himself right in front of Diana, looking down at her from his six foot eight altitude. "_He_ is not the one who has to approve, _Deviant_. I am. And you will regret meddling in my affairs."_

"I've heard that one before." The switchblade appeared in her hand, and the blade flicked out with a menacing _click. "So, what are you going to do? Fight me? Here, on my own ground?"_

"I just might," Patrick growled.

As quietly as I could, I got to my feet. My head was still spinning, and the spot where I had been hit was still aching like crazy, but I wasn't too badly hurt. Patrick had his back turned, and he wouldn't be able to give me any orders if I clamped a hand over his mouth. So he was a mage, was he? Well, I might not be too good at cleaning shirts with a snap of my fingers, but I was damn well a mage too despite of that, and I was about to show some mage-like initiative.

"What did you do to him?" Patrick said, almost sounding like he was talking to himself. "The override subroutine is clearly intact. You've done something to the suppressor functions, though. How did you manage that?"

"I'm very resourceful," Diana said lightly. She and Patrick were watching each other with an intensity that was almost overwhelming to see. The moment one of them struck, I realised, Diana's apartment was going to turn into a battlefield. I had seen Diana fight. Patrick was an unknown quantity, even though I could vouch for him having a good right… but I had no doubt that he would have some way to face the worst Diana could throw at him.

I was within range now. I lashed out with both hands at Patrick's neck, without making a sound.

Patrick's hands came up with frightening speed, grabbing my wrists in a vice-like grip. I gave off a muffled shout of pain. Even Diana seemed surprised by the sheer effortlessness of Patrick's reaction; he hadn't even taken his eyes off of her.

"Simon has all the stealth of a limping rhinoceros," he said with disgust. "But point taken. You have managed to get a certain amount of control over him. If I fought you, I would endanger both him and myself. That's an unacceptable risk."

"Then get out," Diana said flatly.

I didn't say anything. It was all I could do not to scream. I felt like Patrick was crushing my bones with his bare hands. And even that was not as bad as the damage on my ego. I felt very unEmpowered and very much like I should have stood aside and let my betters determine my fate. I had done so all my life, after all, and old habits die hard.

"Very well," Patrick said. "But just to make sure you don't do anything hasty, like try to shoot me in the back as I walk away… **Simon, keep her occupied until I have gotten away**."

Suddenly, he wasn't holding my wrists anymore. I hardly noticed. Without knowing why, I was throwing myself forward, past him and at Diana. She retreated back into the kitchen, quickly and gracefully. I followed.

It wasn't even as if I was being forced. If I had been forced, I would have been able to fight it, no matter how feebly. It was like there was just no other alternative. I couldn't choose not bleed if someone cut me, I couldn't choose not to fall if someone pushed me off a cliff, and I couldn't choose not to obey when Patrick gave me an order.

There was just enough left of _me in my head to scream in impotent protest as I looked around to see where Diana had gotten to. I had just enough time to register that she had slipped to the side of the door before her foot hit me in the side and threw me against the wall. My legs folded under me, and I dropped to the floor. There was pain, but it was distant._

"Sorry," Diana said with a grimace. "Just stay down there until…"

Excellent advice. Too bad I couldn't follow it. I got up, heavily and gracelessly, and threw myself at her again, arms reached out to grab or hit.

Diana twisted out of my way and gave me a hard push in the back. I hit another wall, head-first this time.

"_Stay down_!" Diana snapped. There was something in her voice that was not almost, but not quite, hysteria.

I tried to obey her. Why should I obey Patrick and not her? She was just as Empowered, and hell of a lot nicer. But apparently it didn't work that way. The ringing in my ears and the flashes before my eyes, neither of which had quite had time to disappear, had doubled, but still I forced myself up.

I felt strangely light. There was something… pleasant… about this strange slavery I was in. I didn't have to think. I didn't have to plan. I didn't have to worry about anything, not even about my own life, because my life wasn't important. I just had to do what I was told, and keep doing it until I was done. It was all very simple.

That fact made me feel more disgusted with myself than the fact that I was trying to hurt someone I cared about.

"Damn it, Simoooooooon…" Diana growled between her teeth as she backed away from my stumbling advance. She pulled back the sleeve on her left arm, exposing what looked like a very futuristic bracelet; all shiny metal and plastic buttons. She fiddled with it as I got closer. I didn't pay it any attention. Keep her occupied. That was all I had to do. Keep her occupied.

There was a flash of light, not unlike a camera taking a shot. And suddenly I was in pain.

I mean _serious pain. I hadn't been feeling too well since Patrick had hit me, but that had just sat on the surface of my simple-minded attempts to 'keep her occupied', as Patrick had ordered. This pain didn't. This was pain with an attitude. Pain not to be messed with. It drilled itself into my stomach and erupted in an explosion of agony that sent me too my knees._

"Come on, Simon, _fight it!" Diana urged. She still held her right hand on the bracelet. It was giving off a constant, electric hum. "Don't make me hurt you more!"_

Somewhere, I found the strength to reach out for her. Keep her occupied, keep her occupied.

Diana gave off a noise that sounded strangely like a sob. She turned a wheel on the bracelet. The humming intensified.

So did the pain.

I don't know how long I spent on my back, writhing in agony. I had never felt anything even vaguely like it. It centred on my stomach, but sent its tendrils up my back and down into my hips, putting my nerves on fire as it went. I screamed myself hoarse, and still it wouldn't stop.

Then, finally, it did. I lay still, eyes closed, not moving a muscle, as if I was afraid that any motion would bring the torture crashing down on me again.

"Simon?" Diana said. "Are you yourself again?"

"… yes…" I croaked. And I was, too. My head felt like it usually did; there were no strange compulsions to keep anyone occupied. I guessed that the time limit had expired; Patrick was safely away, and as such, my mission was at an end.

_God damn him, I thought with sick disgust. _God damn him, he can't do this to me, he has no _right__ to do this to me…_

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry." I heard her kneel next to me, putting one hand on my chest and stroking my cold-sweaty brow with the other. "I had to. You know that, right? It was that, kill you, or get killed. I didn't want to hurt you, but I _had_ to."

I wasn't so sure – I didn't think that I would have hurt her if I had gotten to her, only held her in place – but I could see her point. If some big guy who I knew to be under the influence of my enemy had come at me I wouldn't have trusted too much in the letter of his orders, either.

"I know," I mumbled. Slowly, I opened my eyes. Diana looked down at me with concern. I tried to smile. "What _was that?"_

"This?" She glanced at the bracelet. "It's a weapon… Or, well, that's one application of it, anyway. It makes people live through simulations of biological events. It was the first gadget I could get my hands on." She looked back at me. "Are you all right?"

That was some question. In the last twenty-four hours, I had been electrocuted, strangled, beaten, clawed and thrown into walls. I wasn't really feeling my best. By now, I had a collection of bruises that would do a boxer credit. But I supposed that I could have been worse. I was still alive and didn't seem to have broken anything. That was a miracle in itself.

"I guess so," I said. I tried to sit up. That worked surprisingly well, actually. Apparently it had only _been a simulation – there was no lasting pain from that weird machine Diana had used. "What was it a simulation __of?" I said._

"Oh, nothing special," Diana said quickly. A little too quickly. "Look, we have to get out of here. Farsons knows a lot of people who could mess me up bad."

"Fine by me," I said. I held out a hand for her to help me, and she dragged me to my feet. "But I still want to know what it was a simulation of."

"Er…" Diana smiled nervously. "You know, you really don't want to know."

"Diana," I said flatly. "There is _nothing that I don't want to know."_

She sighed.

"Okay, fine. It was labour pains. Now, give me a minute while I…"

"_Labour pains_?" I howled.

"Well, I…" Diana said, backing away while lifting her hands in a calming motion.

"_You made me GIVE BIRTH_?"

"No, no, it was just a simulation…" Diana said unhappily.

"_Do you have any idea how demasculating that feels_?"

"Of course I do," Diana said flatly. "I meant to use it on Farson, remember?"

"Oh." My hysterical outburst grinded to a halt. The idea of Patrick being forced to experience firsthand the miracle of birth _was kind of funny… "But _even so_…"_

Diana smiled crookedly.

"Hey, I have a limited amount of experiences programmed into this thing," she said. "And only a few of them can be used as weapons. I had to choose between 'giving birth' and 'being extremely drunk'. It would have been kind of fun to see him stagger and vomit, of course, but it didn't really feel sadistic enough. Besides, I have a feeling he'd be able to counteract something as relatively mild as that."

"Okay, okay." I sighed. "I understand. Sorry I got upset."

"Well, you just had an upsetting experience." She took me by the hand and led me to a chair, which she gently pushed me down on. She sat down on the opposite side of the table. "Now. Do you have any idea what it was he did?"

I slowly shook my head.

"No," I said. "It's just something he can do. When he talks in a certain way, it's like I don't have a will of my own anymore." I grimaced. "I guess he's always been able to do that. I've just never thought about before. In a way, I suppose I've sort of…" I made a pause, unwilling to say what I had to say next. "Enjoyed it," I finally groaned. "Having someone give irrefutable orders made me feel like all was right with the world."

Diana smiled sadly and squeezed my hand.

"Most people feel like that," she said. "They _say_ they want freedom and equality, but what they really _want_ is food on the table, a roof over their heads and not too much effort… including the effort it takes to think for themselves. But here's the good news: if you had really been one of those people to the core, you would never have been Empowered in the first place. Something rebelled. Instead of being ashamed about not being perfect, be proud of being better than most."

I smiled weakly.

"Thanks. But I have to admit that I don't have a clue what it is he does when he… takes control. It's magick, though, isn't it? It's a… a spell or something."

"Well… the distinction is hard to make, sometimes." She flashed me a smile. "Remember, wishes and beliefs shape the world. That means that even the most mundane person on Earth performs magick on a daily basis, without even being aware of it. Take what I do. Is that magick?"

"You've said so," I said warily. "But I guess you're going to tell me that that was also an oversimplification."

"Oh, yes." She nodded. "Almost anything that has been simplified down far enough to be expressed in words has been simplified down far enough to no longer be true. According to one reference frame, I use various kinds of technology mostly as a way to focus my mind as I make the world change by pure force of will. According to another, opposite reference frame, I'm simply operating machinery and software that by its very nature is too complex, and dependent on natural laws that are too chaotic, for anyone without my deep and intuitive understanding of various sciences to use accurately."

"And both are true?" I said.

"Of course. And so is everything in between those two extremes. When you stop seeing a contradiction there, you'll be a very powerful mage indeed."

I decided to take her word for it. It seemed like the only way to avoid having my brain overheat.

"How does that relate to Patrick?" I said.

"I'm just trying to explain why 'it's magick' is an incomplete explanation," Diana said. "In one way, yes, that _was_ magick. In another, it was the application of some very advanced scientifical principles."

"Wait a moment," I said. "How can there be scientifical principles that needs magick to be invoked? Aren't scientifical principles part of the Consensus? In fact, isn't the Consensus what _makes scientifical principles?"_

"Look at it this way," Diana said. "Most people don't understand quantum physics, right?"

"Right," I admitted.

"Therefore, the workings of quantum physics are not part of the Consensus, right? Any application of those natural laws would by necessity be magick."

"Right."

"Even so, certain people, ones with lots and lots of education, _do_ understand quantum physics, right? And people in general _do believe that even though _they_ don't understand, those educated people do, and can achieve things that ordinary people can't due to that understanding?"_

"Right," I said for the third time.

"Clearly, then, the Consensus actually contains the rule that some people can do things that falls outside of it. To put it in a slightly less confusing way, there are actions that the Consensus will oppose, there are actions that the Consensus will support, and then there are actions that the Consensus will just ignore."

"I guess that makes sense," I said. Then I wrinkled my brow. "Wait. If it makes sense, it's an oversimplification, isn't it?"

"Yes, but that's all we've got time for right now." Diana got up from her chair. "I need to pack a bag. We need to be out of here before Farson manages to send someone at us. Or some_thing_."

"Wait." I blinked. "Are you saying we have to flee the country or something?"

Diana stopped in the doorway and turned her head.

"_You_ probably don't have to flee anywhere," she said. "As far as he's concerned, you've just gotten under bad influence. And _I_ am very good at disappearing from view without moving very far." She grinned nastily. "But before I start with that, I'm going to hit 'him' where it hurts, and I was thinking that you might want to have a front row seat while I do that."

I had to admit that she was perfectly right about that.

Ten minutes later, we were out the door and heading towards the nearest subway station. My car, it seemed, had not moved here along with its Secondary equivalent. That made me wonder if the car in Secondary was still outside of Diana's futuristic fortress there. If that dimension was only a sort of twisted mirror image of this one, did that mean that given enough time, the car would simply switch back to echoing its realer version's location?

Mostly, though, I was wondering if my back would break from all the luggage I was carrying. That sort of questions tend to manage to dominate one's thought process.

Diana, being a woman, was apparently unable to grasp the concept of travelling light. However, being a rather unusual woman, she had her own ideas about what needed packing. Judging from the sharp edges that cut into my back, the backpack I was wearing was full of gadgets. I had no doubt that the same applied for the shoulder-bag and both the briefcases. And they certainly _weighed_ enough to be full of metallic objects.

"Remind me again why I am the one who's acting the mule?" I said to Diana, who didn't carry anything that didn't fit into her black overcoat. She grinned shamelessly at me.

"Because you're the big, strong man," she said. "It shouldn't be _that_ hard for you to handle some weight, not with all those muscles of yours."

"You do realise that if I hadn't been desperate to reaffirm my masculinity right now," I grumbled, "there's _no way I would fall for that sort of transparent manipulation?"_

"Yep," Diana said. "I'm just not going to waste _skilful_ manipulation on you when the transparent kind works perfectly well at the moment." She turned serious. "Actually, there _is_ a good reason why you should do the carrying. I'm the better fighter, and we might run into trouble. I should be unburdened if that happens."

"The alternative," I said, spotting the hole in the reasoning, "is that you _could_ have left some of this stuff _behind_."

"Yes, but I left way too much behind for comfort as it was," Diana said. "It's hard to be a technomancer without your gadgets. If we have to change faces in a hurry, you'll be _grateful I was thoughtful enough to bring my DNA resequencer." She patted one of the briefcases I carried. "Actually, I've put one of my little toys to work already. It should stop Farson from finding you again."_

"Oh." I looked at the bag like it had contained a living viper. Much as all those weird gizmos fascinated me, they also freaked me out ever so little. One got used to the idea of ordinary technology, if only from hearing about it every now and then. Diana's machines operated on a set of rules that I had no idea what they were, and that meant that I had no way of foreseeing the consequences of their use.

I didn't like that. It felt like being blind.

_One day I'll understand it all, though, I promised myself. __One day I'll be the bigshot mage who keeps befuddling some newly Empowered sucker that I'm tutoring. There's something to look forward to._

"How _did he find me?" I added. "I'm half expecting to find out that he's got a chip in my head that lets him track me."_

"That's a possibility," Diana admitted. "But he might just use some special equipment and scan for your biosignature. You can't really hide from someone like Farson. Not without some serious countermeasures, at least."

"Which you have now taken," I said.

"Oh, yes." She grinned smugly. "I've put up such a strong jamming field around us that I wouldn't surprise me if I've knocked out every satellite dish in the neighbourhood. He'll have to find us by mundane means. That doesn't mean he can't, but it does mean that it'll take longer. With a bit of luck, we'll be safely hidden away before he gets his act together."

We reached the subway and went down the stairs. After that, every time I tried to ask something, Diana hushed me. I supposed that there were too many people around for comfort. Me being such a large man, and Diana being such a beautiful woman, we probably got more attention than a pair of fugitives should be comfortable with as it was. The last thing we needed was for someone to _also_ hear us talk about stuff that sounded like it was straight out of some psychedelic novel.

Even so, it was all I could do to contain myself. I was nervous and I wanted a handle on the situation, and that meant that I wanted information. If I knew enough about what was going on, perhaps I would be able to calm down a little.

Actually, my common sense pointed out, I would probably be even _more_ nervous if I knew just what we were up against. I had no doubt that Patrick represented something that was far worse than anything I could think of, and the less I knew about it the better I would feel. But that didn't sway me. I _still wanted to know everything._

You can't fight your inner nature, I suppose.

The next hour and a half, we spent going from one train to another. We would one a few stations along the way, and then switch to another, ride _that_ to the next station along its route, wait there for twenty minutes while two trains stopped and continued, and then get on another one that was heading in the complete opposite direction to where we had been going to start with.

I had an idea that I understood what Diana was doing. She was confusing the issue for any pursuers. If every move we made was seemingly random, then they would have no way of guessing where we would end up. When Patrick started checking, he would find sightings of us spread all over the Dougal subway system. He could probably puzzle it out eventually, but it would take a good while.

It sounded good in theory.

Eventually, we found ourselves in an empty coach. I was going to start up the barrage of questions again, but Diana beat me to it.

"I'm guessing you want to know about Farson," she said, grinning at me from her window seat.

"Well," I had to admit, "yes. I mean, the guy more or less runs my life. It'd be nice to at least know _why he's doing it. Besides," I smiled wryly, "it's hard to not get curious, with you talking about him like he's the Devil himself."_

"The Devil himself?" Diana grimaced. "The Devil has barricaded himself in Hell and is hoping that people like Farson won't come for him. There's no room for demons in Farson's world. Not angels either, for that matter."

I hoped with a certain amount of passion that Diana's talking about the Devil like he was an actual, physical person who really existed out there somewhere was just a figure of speech. It was just that it didn't really _sound_ like a figure of speech. It sounded like she was talking about a co-worker, one she didn't much like and would love to get rid of, but who she had to put up with anyway.

But it was Patrick that I was curious about, and sooner or later someone would enter the coach and the imparting of information would be over.

"Who _is he?" I said. "Who are 'people like him'?"_

"Well." Diana looked at her knees and chewed absently on a thumbnail. "I've told you that mages have the ability to change the world, right? Actually _rewrite the laws of nature _to suit them. We can turn the world into whatever we feel like, at least potentionally."

"Yeah, I've understood that much," I said. "And don't worry, I still remember the oversimplification thing."

She smiled at that.

"Good. Well, if you have the ability to change the world, it stands to reason that you _also have the ability to keep it just the way it is."_

"I guess." I wrinkled my brow. "Sounds kind of boring, though."

"Boring is good sometimes," Diana said. "Can you honestly say that there wasn't a time in the last few days that you wanted everything to be nice and boring and predictable again, just for a little while?"

I remembered lying on the floor of Diana's apartment and not wanting to get up, because I knew that once I did, the world would hit me with more incomprehensible experiences. I nodded slowly.

"Exactly. Change is _dangerous, because it invalidates experience. It means you have to discard your old models about how the world works, and start building new ones. Besides, change swings both ways; things might get better, or they might get worse. You know what you have, though, and it's usually not __that bad, once you've adapted to it."_

"Yes," I admitted, "but…"

Diana nodded.

"But," she agreed. "_But that's a coward's way of thinking, and settling for what you have, not because you're satisfied with it, but because you're afraid to reach for more – that just leads to a bleak, depressing existence that will leave you unfulfilled. Mind you, __never settling for anything and __always wanting more leads to its own brand of misery, but people in general are a bit too fond of what they call 'realistic goals', if you ask me."_

"I don't know," I said. I thought about some of the people I knew. How many of them seemed to be happy? How many had made sure that they achieved every objective that was important for their happiness, and how many had just decided that this was as good as it was going to get so they might as well learn to live with it? There were some of either group, I knew, but I had to agree with Diana; the second was much larger. "Yeah. I suppose. But if that's what the world looks like at the moment, doesn't that mean…?"

"It means that the Farsons of the world are winning right now," Diana said. "Yes." She smiled with tired humour. "It's a war that's been going on since the beginning of time, Simon. Waged between mages, with the minds and souls of mankind as its battlefield. On one side, there's those who wants the Consensus to be flexible, adjustable and subject to constant change. On the other, there are those who wants to it to be frozen into place, so that everything will be predictable and reliable. It's nothing less than the eternal conflict between order and chaos – or freedom and control, depending on which side you ask."

"So Patrick is a champion of order?" I thought that over. "That doesn't surprise me. He always wants everything to be organised. And you're a champion of freedom, I take it."

Diana grinned and saluted me.

"Proud of it," she said. "There's far too much control in the world these days, and far too little freedom. In another world, in another time, I might have joined up with Farson, because there is such a thing as _too much_ freedom. As it is, I'm a proud member of the Nine Traditions."

"The Nine Traditions?" I said. "Wait, Kevin said something about those. The Virtual Adepts and the Order of Hermes, wasn't it?"

"As well as their seven comrades-in-arms. Yes." She nodded. "We're trying to bring the world back to a way of thinking that will make the Consensus loosen up a little. Our magick will be stronger then, but that's really beside the point… okay, for _some of us that's beside the point. The point is that it will be a nicer world to live in if reality has a bit of slack in it. In a world like that, if there's a will there really _is_ a way."_

"And Patrick?" I said.

"He thinks that it's better if there either is a way or there isn't, regardless of any will applied. That way, no one ever have to make an effort. They live and die as the almighty rules decree." She scowled. "You won't ever see him or anyone like him on the news, Simon. But make no mistake, very little happens in the world that they haven't authorised. They're quite possibly the most efficient conspiracy in history. They nudge events here and plant a suggestion there, and the world keeps turning their way. They're not infallible, but they're very _very good at their job, and this age is their age._

"They call themselves _the Technocracy."_

I actually felt a shiver when she said those last words. The Technocracy. The name made me think of a machine, large as a world and powerful as God almighty, with thousands, _millions_ of kegs and winders and wheels, all turning in perfect synchronising, protecting everyone who followed its rules and grinding down everyone who worked against it. Remorseless. All-powerful. Terrifying beyond reckoning.

Diana placed a hand on my wrist. Her expression was one of sympathy.

"You saw it, didn't you?" she said.

"I… what?" I said intelligently.

"You just had a flash of insight," she said. "Didn't you? It happens to us sometimes. Hell, not just to us, either. To artists, philosophers and prophets, too. You saw a vision of the world as it really is, rather than the view that the Consensus gives us."

"I… guess I did," I said, somewhat startled. "Is it really that bad, then? Is Patrick and the rest of this… this Technocracy unbeatable?"

"Patrick definitely isn't," Diana said. "Whatever else he is, he's still a man, not a god. The Technocracy is a somewhat harder nut to crack, though. The Traditions have been trying for about six hundred years now, and all that's happened is that it's grown _stronger_ despite our best efforts." She smiled. "Have faith, though. I can't predict the future, but I do know that nothing lasts forever. The Technocracy will fall, in time. Like I said, it's the war between order and chaos, and neither side can ever win. Perfect order will always eventually break down into chaos, and perfect chaos will always eventually give birth to a new order. The Technocracy runs the show now. Before the Renaissance, it was the Traditions… or at least the loose organisations of individualistically inclined mages who would _become the Traditions. Before that, during the time of the Roman Empire, I daresay that there was some kind of Technocracy behind the scenes, keeping everything stable. Before that, it was us again… You see what I mean, don't you? It keeps going back and forth, and neither one of us can do more than stay on top for a little while at the time."_

"None of which," I said dryly, "changes the fact that we, as you said, live in the age of the Technocracy, and have to put up with people like Patrick."

She laughed.

"Yeah. Sorry. The philosopher in me got loose for a moment."

"One thing I don't quite understand," I said, "is what, exactly, it is that the Technocracy is doing. If I remember my history books correctly, people actually have rather _more_ freedom today than they did, say, three hundred years ago. I mean, I'm not naïve enough to think that democracy equals freedom and brotherhood and all that stuff, but it beats the hell out of totalitarian monarchy."

"Mmm." Diana hesitated. "There are several possible responses to that one, all of which have a bit of truth in them. Do you want me to go through them one after another?"

"Please do," I said.

"Okay. One." She started counting off points on her fingers. "The oversimplification thing again. The Technocracy is made up by _people_, most of which are actually rather more sympathetic than Farson. They're not, as I made them out to be, the perfect vessel of order and control. They don't set out to enslave humanity; in fact, they set out to _free humanity, from the kind of atrocities that arrogant individualist-mages committed during our last reign in the Middle Ages. That means that while they _in general_ work to bring more order and control to the world, not every effort they make will be towards that end._

"Two. While your 'totalitarian monarchy' is indeed a nice and orderly system, it also stands for just about everything that the Technocracy despises. It gives one guy all the power. Remember, the Consensus _itself_ is the ultimate democratic device, giving everyone a vote in how the world is supposed to look. Democracy gives every citizen, no matter if they're educated or ignorant, brave or chicken, intelligent or stupid, the same basic amount of power. That's the absolute antithesis of what Traditionalists believe in, and as such, the Technocracy is all for it.

"Three. Democracy, when done right, is a _more_ orderly system than tyranny. Tyrants face rebellions, since that's the only alternative for common people who want to make a change. Under a democratic system, people who are displeased with one leader will just vote him away and put a new leader in his place. The Technocracy finds one President as easy to manipulate as another, so for a very minimal extra effort they get a populace that happily allows itself to be ruled since they're convinced that they're ruling themselves."

"Wouldn't people notice that one President is very much like another, regardless of what they _claim_ their politics are, and get suspicious?" I said. Diana threw me a meaningful glance. I blinked for a moment, but then got it. "Okay, true, they haven't so far…"

"Four," Diana said, giving me a proud smile. "Recorded history is unreliable. The Technocracy is good at showing the world the version of the truth that suits it the best. _Maybe_ having kings and lords and so on wasn't as bad as they want us to think. _Maybe the medieval social system allowed for even __better chances at advancing through personal capability than our current system does. We have no way of knowing. Any historian who writes anything that hints that the world the Technocracy has created might _not_ be the best world there ever was will get censored before anyone has a chance to listen, and the records he has based his research on will be destroyed._

"Five. The Technocracy couldn't care _less_ about who takes care of the day-to-day concerns of a country, because the way they rule the world is much more insidious and grants far grater power in the long run."

I blinked.

"Which brings us back to my original question," I said. "_How do they rule the world?"_

"By creating an environment which encourages the kind of behaviour that they approve of," Diana said. "Okay, so maybe that's a bit too theoretic to count as a good answer… In practice, most of the Technocracy's agenda is carried out by controlling the media. They're _good_ at that. They make sure that newspapers print only things that proves them right over and over again. They make sure that no author who argues too heatedly or skilfully against their philosophy ever gets published. It all builds up. People who never hear any deviant opinions eventually start to think that there _are_ no deviant opinions."

"Wait a minute," I said. "That I _know_ can't be right. If everyone was of the same opinion, why would there be so much arguing? We've got two political parties that love to yell at each other, for instance. Which one expresses the Technocracy's opinions?"

"Both," Diana said.

"That's impossible."

"Not when you think about it for a while." Diana smiled wryly. "The conservatists basically want an economy controlled by whoever has the most money and a focus on wholesome, old-fashioned family values. The Technocracy loves that, because it _has_ the most money, so it will run the economy, and it likes it when people only think about small, simple things and leave the big thinking to them. The liberals, on the other hand, basically wants an economy controlled in large parts by the state and equal treatment of all. The Technocracy loves that too, because it can influence the state enough that it will _still_ run the economy, and like I said, equal treatment for all, rather than the treatment each person deserves, is one of the things it stands for."

I looked doubtful.

"I'm not so sure about this reasoning…"

"Well, it's true. Mostly, anyway. Like I said, oversimplifications." She grinned self-ironically. "Besides, acceptable politics run a very short gamut from one side to another. The Technocracy can adapt to suit any place within that frame. And it's managed to make sure that anyone who voices an opinion outside of that framework is considered a freak. Now, that's _power_. Wait another hundred years, and you'll see the edges start creeping in towards the middle, until you can barely tell one extreme side from the other; and _still people will answer like you did when someone tells them that there's only one opinion being voiced." She tilted her head, glancing at me with a certain amount of amusement at my obvious discomfort. "Still not convinced?"_

"Maybe not quite," I admitted. "Of course, if you're right, then I've been indoctrinated into this way of thinking all my life. It'll take me a little while to assess it objectively."

"Well, take a look at the world around you," Diana said. "Are people proudly flaunting their uniqueness? Do they openly disagree with the way the world is presented to them, if it doesn't strike them as accurate? Or do we have a fashion industry that tells everyone to dress the same way, an education system that tells everyone to believe in the same things, fiction that encourage a sort of two-penny morality that doesn't even come close to taking into account real feelings as experienced by real people, politicians who stick to the smallest common denominator when it comes to opinions because anyone who's the least bit unorthodox doesn't stand a chance of getting elected… and don't get me started on talk shows."

"What about talk shows?" I said, tempting fate.

"They invite a bunch of people who live their lives differently," Diana said flatly, "and make sure that those people are the dumbest, most unscrupulous individuals they can dig out of the trash of humanity. The message? 'Different people are _bad_ people, stick to being normal and you'll be fine.' I have a feeling that the Technocrats are still slapping themselves on the back over that idea."

"I _wondered who came up with those things," I mumbled. "Stands to reason it was some sort of evil genius…"_

"The fact of the matter is," Diana said, "that we live in a world that hates everything that's different and loves everything that's just the same as everything else. The Technocracy doesn't have to get out there and deal with unauthorised thinking, because people do that to each other on their own accord. Any new idea will be shot down, because if it worked, someone would already have done it, right? Anyone who stands out will be ostracized by his peers. Anyone who doesn't live his life according to conventional wisdom will be considered to be stupid and pathetic. The great machine keeps ticking along, and the Technocrats can just lean back and watch as everything gets more and more orderly."

"Are you sure that the whole issue of conformity is the Technocracy's doing?" I said. "I've always thought that it was just in human nature. Going against the group is scary."

"But it's _also_ in human nature to want to live in the way that you're most comfortable with," Diana said. "That's order and chaos again, fighting inside each and every one of us. What the Technocracy has done is stack the cards in favour of order. They can't make sure that the outcome is the one they want in each case, but they can create a general tendency. In the same way, it's theoretically possible for the Traditions to stack the cards in favour of chaos – of self-expression and individuality. A world that encourages independent thinking is possible – though how it would have to be arranged is a question that just about every Traditionalist has her own answer to."

"Everything is possible, but nothing is simple," I said. "And some things are bloody stupid."

Diana rolled her eyes.

"Is it just me," she said, "or do a lot of my lessons in what is supposed to be wisdom stick in your memory like nothing else than weird-sounding one-liners?"

"At least I'm remembering _something_ this way," I said, smiling wryly. "I'm not sure I can remember all you say about how magick works and how human society is being controlled from behind the curtains, but I _can_ remember 'everything is possible, but nothing is simple'. A lot of the rest follows naturally from that. The rest you may just have to tell me again."

Diana gave me a weary look.

"And again," she said glumly, "and again, and again, and again?"

"Well, I'll try to learn before it comes to that," I promised, "but it's not all that easy for me to even believe in all this stuff. I'm thirty-three years old, you know. I've got a lot of practice in not believing in things like this. You may just have to repeat yourself a lot."

Diana facepalmed.

"It's been twelve years since I last took an apprentice," she said with theatrical suffering. "Now I remember why that is."

"So I _will be your apprentice, then?" I said. "I was going to ask you to teach me, but then there was that whole mess with Patrick, and then you said that you were going to go underground for a while, so I assume…"_

"You generally shouldn't do that," Diana said. She looked up, grinning crookedly. "Yes, yes, _of course_ I'll apprentice you. It's not really that big a deal, not in my Tradition. We're not very formal. With Kevin it'd be all sorts of initiation rites and vows and getting your ceremonial name and God knows what else. Of course, it'd _also be a lot of help and guidance and a structured education. You'll have a tougher time with me."_

Oh dear.

"I'll try to measure up," I said. "But how can you teach me in _any way if you won't be here?"_

Diana glanced at me, looking somewhat smug.

"That sort of thing just so happens to be a Virtual Adept speciality," she said. "But this is our station. I think three more switches will be enough for it to be safe for us to go where I'm planning."

And that was all she would say on that particular subject. Of course, what she meant became clear soon enough, when I found out just _how subjective reality was – and what worlds lay open for a mage who was willing to claim them._


	7. Whirlwind and PurplePiper

_DISCLAIMER:_ _Maybe I should claim that this is all my inventions. You know, just for variety? =]_

_Okay, maybe not. The World of Darkness and everything therein belongs to someone who's not me, yadi yadi yadda. Would be fun if it did belong to me, though. I'd be able to do a lot of things with it. I'd exterminate all bloody werewolves, for starters. (*sinks into blissful reverie on the subject*) Aaahhhhh…_

_Anyway.__ Seriously. This is the last__ chapter in Reign of Conformity_, which I've been working on for… er, I don't know, actually… pretty damn long, anyway. More than a year, for certain. Simon and Diana has occupied a significant part of my imagination for all this time, and I daresay they will continue to do that. Without giving away too much, I can tell you that there'll be _tons__ of loose ends when this chapter ends, and I fully intend to deal with them all – as well as with a great number of new ideas that I got during the course of writing._

_My sincere thanks to everyone who has followed me all the way to the end (I know for a fact that there's at least _one_ person, but hopefully there are some others, too =]), and I hope that you've enjoyed yourselves. I know I have._

_Oh, and one final note: for those of you who haven't noticed, I've completely rewritten the sixth chapter. If you have only read the first version, go back and read it again before proceeding. Trust me, it will spare you _so_ much confusion. =]_

I really had no idea which part of town we were in when we finally got up from the subway. I could see that all the buildings were rather big and old, though. The word 'gothic' flittered through my head at the sight. They also seemed to be in generally good condition, despite the fact that they were probably very hard to maintain. An old part of town that had been built for rich people and was still owned by rich people, then – but that was as far as I got. Dougal isn't one of the world's major cities, but it _is_ large enough that you can live there your whole life and still only know how a small part of it looks like.

Well, you can, if you're as boring as I am, at least. I don't really explore new territory a lot. Or I didn't use to.

"Where are we?" I said, looking from side to side as I followed Diana.

"Marbleton," she said promptly. "Just south of the business district. We're going to go and visit Kevin."

Que surge of insane jealousy, which I quickly suppressed. She had spent last night – well, last _day_, technically – with _me. And she didn't seem the least bit guilty about that. That, surely, must mean that nothing serious was going on between her and Kevin, no matter how comfortable they were with each other._

I tried that reasoning on for size, and admitted that it sounded pretty good. Unfortunately, any sort of reasoning applied to Diana was prone to failure. Diana didn't really behave like most people. And while I had gotten to know her at least superficially over the last six months, and gotten to know her a whole lot better in the last few days, I still couldn't figure out what was going on in her head with any degree of accuracy.

"You think you'll need help to fight 'him'?" I said.

"That too," she said. "But mostly, I just need somewhere to log on. Ah, here we are."

We stood in front of a tall building that gave an impression of stubborn resistance to time. It was built in some dark stone, which was now chipped and broken in places. The railing framing the stairs leading up to the door were made of wrought iron, as were the decorations around the windows. Something in the make of the structure suggested that there ought to be gargoyles on the roof, but of course there wasn't.

"Not exactly cosy," I noted. Diana smiled.

"Kevin likes the ambience," she said. "He'll take style over comfort any time."

"For a given value of _style_, apparently," I mumbled as we walked up the stairs and in through the door. Inside, there were more stairs; apparently, the residents here felt that it would have been heresy to install an elevator.

"Just a few more stairs," Diana told me merrily, after we had climbed for a while. "Try not to collapse before that."

"Ehhhhh…" I managed to answer. Carrying Diana's luggage on _plane ground had been bothersome enough. I made a quick mental calculation on the force I had to produce in order for me to get one step further up, and the result made me feel even more tired. And Diana strolling up completely unburdened didn't make it any easier._

"Come on, you can do it!" the horrible woman called from the top floor. She was grinning widely at the sight of me struggling. "We're all counting on you!"

"Ehhhhh!" I groaned and forced myself to take another step. And then another. And then, finally, I was at the top floor. I let the bags in my hands drop to the floor and leaned on the wall, panting.

Diana patted me on the arm.

"_Good boy," she said._

I gave her my best _Don't__ mess with me glare, but she just laughed and knocked on the door. There was just one on this floor, I noticed, marked 'K Harsh' on an ornamented bronze sign. There was no doorbell, but instead a wrought iron knocker in the shape of bird with its wings spread._

After a moment, there was a rattle of locks on the other side, and Kevin opened. He was wearing a different suite than he had the same morning. This one was spotlessly white with the exception for the tie, which was decorated with images of red roses. It was, however, just as stylish and impeccable as the dark one I had seen him in before. He looked great in it. But then, I was starting to realise that Kevin would look great in _anything_. His complete certainty that whatever he wore at the moment was _just the thing, old boy, would make it impossible for anyone else to disapprove of it._

The Empowering had more uses than just magick, apparently.

"Diana," he said. His tone managed to express both pleasant surprise at her appearance and a polite question of what she was doing there.

"Hi, Kevin," Diana said. "Can I come in? The Man is out to get me."

"The Man is out to get everyone," Kevin said and gracefully stepped aside to let us in. "I really have no idea why. Maybe he's just not a very nice Man. Hello, Mr Stromberg, how nice to see you again."

I mumbled something vaguely pleasant in return as I stepped inside, following Diana. And then I caught sight of Kevin's apartment. It was… breathtaking.

I don't think there was a shred of plastic to be found. All the furniture was wood and metal, and carved and ornamented until every chair or lamppost was a marvel of artistry. The carpet in the hallway I was in was scarlet, with black patterns along the edges, thick and costly-looking. On the walls hung oil painting in intricate frames.

The air smelled like old books and dusty velvet. It felt like being inside the world's smallest Victorian mansion.

Style over comfort, indeed…

"I need to set up a DW interface," Diana told Kevin when he had closed the door again. "Two, if possible. Do you still have your old rig?"

"Yes," Kevin said evenly, "but I can't promise that it will work. I haven't used it for quite some time, you know."

"That's okay. I'd like to bring Simon along, but I can't make do without him if I have to. There's some other stuff I need from you, though."

"Ah," Kevin said with a certain lack of enthusiasm. "You are, I take it, calling in those last few favours I owe you?"

"Yep," Diana said cheerfully. "Now, first of all I need you to tighten the Gauntlet around here."

"That wouldn't seem to present much difficulty," Kevin said with a shrug. "It _is Whirlwind, then, I presume?"_

"Excuse me," I said.

"I think so," Diana said. "I've established an 86,55 % method pattern match."

"Are you really going to face him in his domain?" Kevin said. "I would advice against it. Especially since, I can't help noticing, there's a very high risk that he'd track your connection down and find me at the end of it."

"_Excuse me!" I said._

"That's the other thing I need you for," Diana said, grinning. "I'm going to force him to step out of the Web. When he does…"

"Oh, I _see," Kevin said. A smile spread on his fine-featured face. "Yes. Yes, that might indeed be just the thing…"_

I took a deep breath.

"EXCUSE! ME! PLEASE!" I yelled.

Diana and Kevin turned to look at me. I glared at them in turn.

"I would like very much," I said, extremely politely, "if you two cut down on the trade language and explained to me, clearly and concisely, what's going on. Assume I know nothing, because I don't."

Diana looked astounded for a moment, but then she started chuckling. Kevin smiled, one eyebrow raised. Neither of them made me feel that much less angry.

"Okay, fair enough," Diana said. "One more storytelling session required, I guess. Just to make you understand what it is we're doing here. But I'm going to have to make some phone calls. Kevin, could you explain to him while you're setting up the ritual?"

"It would be my pleasure," Kevin said. He put one hand on my shoulder and guided me into the next room. "Come on, old chap. I'll tell you about Whirlwind. Or, as you two seem to prefer putting it," his eyes, half-closed, twinkled, "about 'him'."

I had seen that Kevin's door was the only one on the upper-most floor, but somehow, I hadn't realised what that meant. It meant that his apartment occupied _the entire top floor, while all the other ones had three apartments each. Kevin was living a bachelor's life in an amount of space that would have been roomy for two middle-sized families._

I felt a bit taken aback. Kevin must be fairly rich to afford to live like this, and all this elegant furniture couldn't have been cheap, either. I had assumed that I had at least that advantage over him.

_I _could_ live in a place like this,_ I comforted myself. _I've got the salary for it. I just don't see why I should. A place to sleep, that's all I need._

The room he took me to was sparsely furnished; there were only a few big cupboards by the wall. There wasn't a carpet, either, only the naked wood of the floor. It smelled faintly of incense.

Kevin walked up to one of the cabinets and took out five golden candle-holders, long enough that they would reach up to a man's waist when placed on the floor. He carefully placed them in a circle, moving one of them several times to make sure that it stood just right.

"Now, Whirlwind," he said to me as he studied the position of the gleaming rods. "His real name is Karl Militts."

I formed the name silently on my lips. Karl Militts. 'He' had a name. 'He' could be reached. And harmed. That felt very reassuring, somehow.

"I'm not sure how much Diana has told you," Kevin said as he went back to the cupboard and took out five thick vacs candles. "Do you know what the Technocracy is?"

I nodded grimly. Sure I knew what the Technocracy was. I had been working for it for most of my life.

"Splendid, splendid." He started placing the candles in the holders. "Then you also know that there are quite a few people who are not entirely happy with the way they run things. People who don't consider 'just because, that's why' to be an adequate answer to their questions."

"The Traditions," I said.

"Indeed. Hmm, where _did_ I put that chalk?" Kevin opened the other cupboard and rummaged through it. Though 'rummaged' is not a very good word for what he did. It hints at far too unmannered and brutish an action. Kevin managed to make even searching for a missing possession look graceful. "Ah, here it is. Now, where was I? Oh, yes. The Traditions."

He knelt down on the floor between the candle-holders and started drawing some sort of complex pattern.

"The Traditions," he repeated, not taking his eyes off of the work at hand. "Essentially, back in the middle ages, when the Technocracy first appeared, the Order of Hermes brought together all the schools of magick that was threatened by the change from a Dynamic to a Static way of thinking…"

"I'm sorry?" I said. "What was that last part?"

"Hmm." Kevin paused briefly and wrinkled his brow. "I think Diana would have said, 'from Chaos to Order'?"

"Oh." I nodded, feeling somewhat slow-witted for not having understood as much right away. "Yeah, she's told me about that."

Kevin grimaced.

"Very well, then, but realise that it's a clumsy way of putting it. The Traditions are not about _Chaos_. They are about understanding instead of simply knowing, about leading instead of merely controlling, and about co-existing peacefully with those who are different from you rather than attempting to force them to adapt to your way of life. Believe me, chaos is the _last_ thing we want – we simply disagree that the only way to achieve order is by shoving it down everyone's throats, as it were. If you want to describe the Traditions' ideal in one word, then it's _enlightenment_."

I nodded slowly. Two different explanations from two different mages. Both, by definition, true – at least for a given value of 'true'. I wasn't sure how comfortable I was with Kevin's version of Tradition philosophy, though I supposed that it had some merit. It just occurred to me that it would be very easy to go wrong if you tried to follow it. Had the Technocracy initially set out to lead rather than control? I had no way of knowing, but it seemed possible enough.

"Be that as it may," Kevin said as he kept working, "the Council of Nine Traditions is an organisation whose purpose is, for lack of a better description, to save the world. But how do you, in fact, go about saving the world? Even with all our powers and all our knowledge – and believe me, the latter is far more important than the former – it is rather hard to know where to start, do you see?"

"I guess so," I said. "There's a lot of world, and not all too many of you."

Kevin smiled at that.

"Indeed there is, and indeed there are not. And one cannot simply destroy the Technocracy. Even if opportunity presented itself – and the Technocracy is not in the habit of presenting us with opportunities – we would be forced to hesitate. Much as we may resent it, the Technocracy has embedded itself deep within the world of today. It is what makes things tick along as peacefully as they do."

"I'm not sure things are ticking along that peacefully," I said dubiously. "If the Technocracy really wants peace and prosperity above all else, why are there hundreds of minor wars going on all over the world at this very moment?"

"Well, the Technocracy is not omnipotent, of course," Kevin admitted. "But the fact remains that things _are_ rather more, shall we say, _relaxed _in our age. The Technocracy is maintaining order. The common man on the street might not know just how much it does for him in the course of an ordinary day, but if it were to disappear… well, suffice to say that _that would be noticed. All over the world, in the most unpleasant ways possible."_

"You sound almost as if you admired the Technocrats," I said, perplexed.

Kevin turned his head to look at me, his expression astonished. Then he laughed, a surprised and delighted laugh.

"Oh, _dear me," he chuckled. "I seem to have given the wrong impression here. No, no, my friend, believe me when I say that I despise and detest the Technocracy and all its cohorts, its philosophy, its methods and its ever action. But then, I feel rather the same way about insects. They are all so inferior to me as to be beneath even contempt, and their existence offends my sensibilities, but if I were to somehow kill every one of them, the whole world would suffer. The sensible man will attempt to ignore them as far as possible, and of course take steps to ensure that he will not be bitten or stung."_

I scratched my chin. I was starting to wish that Diana would be finished with her calls and get back here. I dealt with people on a daily basis, and my professional success depended on my ability to get along with each and every one of them. Even so, I had no idea how to deal with Kevin. The man seemed to have taken arrogance to a whole new level. He was so sure of himself that he didn't even need to brag, not in the true sense of the word. He was simply stating facts, without caring one bit whether or not I agreed of his lofty opinions of himself.

"Quite," I mumbled.

"In order to _truly_ win over the Technocracy," Kevin said as he got up from the floor and carefully dusted his trouser legs off, "the Traditions have to not only destroy it, but replace it. Or rather I should say that they need to replace the Technocratic philosophy with the Traditional philosophy."

"You keep talking about 'they'," I said. "But you told me that you belonged to a Tradition."

"Oh, I do. Certainly." Kevin smiled at me. "I simply don't count myself among the… overly altruistic individuals within the Traditions. Which are most of them, I must admit."

"You don't want to save the world?"

"Oh, I wouldn't say that." Kevin sighed melancholically as he went back to the cabinet and took out what I after a moment's confusion realised were sticks of incense. "In my misspend youth, I spent considerable effort and personal sacrifice on bringing about a rebirth of free magick in the world. Would you care to know what I accomplished by that?"

"If you'd like to tell me," I said warily. Kevin didn't exactly sound bitter, but his voice was a little strained, like he were having to work harder than usual to keep up his unworried attitude.

"I got myself a fairly impressive selection of scars," Kevin said, holding up his hand and bending one finger at the time as he picked off points. "I killed quite a few people, some of whom were Technocrats, most of whom were collaborators to Technocrats, and some of whom, I tell you with a certain amount of shame, were guilty of nothing worse than being stupid and cowardly. And I lost a man who was… quite precious to me." He smiled sadly. "And that, I'm afraid, is _all I accomplished."_

I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't say anything. I just watched him in silence. Kevin shook his head.

"Don't I want to save the world, my friend? Oh, but I do. The world, however, does not want to be saved by me. People _like_ the Technocracy. They enjoy not having to do anything as unpleasant as think for themselves. These days, I mind, as the saying goes, my own business."

I felt sad. I didn't doubt that Kevin's fight against the Technocracy had been as futile as he had claimed. If the organisation had as much power as Diana had made it out to have, violence wouldn't be of any use, except in the rarest of cases. He had been right to abandon it. But it saddened me that he hadn't been able to find a better way to wage the battle. It saddened me that he had been unable to find a better solution than to give up all hope.

"Diana, of course," he said as he placed the incense sticks around the room, "sees it differently. She fought in the war along with me, and like me, she eventually wizened up and realised the futility of it all. But that merely made her become more subtle." He grinned affectionately at the thought of Diana. I restrained myself from growling. "She will, of course, ultimately understand that her current stance, as well, will avail her nothing. She is a clever girl, if a little stubborn about these things."

"Really?" I couldn't quite see what this all had to do with 'him', but my curiosity betrayed me. "What's she doing now?"

"She attempts," Kevin said while he took the long robe from within the cabinet, shook it out and started to wriggle into it, "to nudge the Sleeper world gently towards individualism and diversity – to a Dynamic paradigm, to be more formal. Her methods, as I understand them, are not unlike the Technocracy's tried-and-true approach; by inserting ever-so-subtle hints into the things people read and watch, so that they eventually mount up inside their heads."

"Does it work?" I said.

"It's a tad bit early to tell." Kevin put on the silver chain I had seen around his neck that morning, drawing up his long hair to let it rest against his neck. "They've only been at it for a few years so far, and at the start, their chosen vessel was not as widespread as it is now."

"Their chosen vessel?" I said. And then, everything sort of clicked into place. Diana watching me. The near-unbelievable progress I read about in my reports. Other things, that I could barely remember consciously, but which still each had given one minor hint to the greater truth. "Oh, God. Greystone…"

Kevin chuckled.

"Ah, yes. Greystone Entertainment Incorporated. A fledgling company, taken under the shadow of Diana's wings… along with the wings of her co-conspirators, that is. They have aided and nurtured it for years now. And every magazine printed, every television show produced, every book published has been altered ever so slightly by their arts. No matter what the formal content is, they all give the viewer or reader a hint of backbone." He shrugged, smiling amiably. "Or so I have been told. I never did bother to learn that particular brand of magick. My own skills are rather more ephemeral… and a great deal more powerful, of course."

"Of course," I said diplomatically.

Kevin reached up to the top of the cabinet, where a long, smooth-carved staff lay. He spun it in his hands, smiling introvertly. He made a striking sight; a slim figure in flowing robes, with his fair hair gleaming and his flawless face calm and self-assured. He looked like the very embodiment of magick.

"Here," he said, "we come to what I believe you would consider the point of it all."

"Militts," I said darkly.

"Whirlwind," Kevin agreed placidly. "A member of Diana's cabal, the real masters of Greystone Entertainment. They call themselves the Azure Angels. Insofar as they have a leader, he is it."

I blinked.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Are you telling me that Diana's boss has been trying to kill me? And probably her, too?"

"This sort of thing makes me _most_ happy that I'm financially independent," Kevin said. The self-ironic gleam in his eyes made the smug grin charming instead of annoying.

I started pacing back and forth in the room. This was a bit much to take in. I had known that Diana had some sort of friends or allies who didn't approve of me, and that she had gone against them in a lot of what she had done and said. But I hadn't expected 'him' to be one of them. What sort of alliances had Diana made in order to carry out this grand plan of hers?

On the other hand, if she had defied someone so close and crucial to her in order to be fair to me, then that was actually very heart-warming…

"So… this man Militts… he _owns_ Greystone Entertainment?" I said.

Kevin shook his head.

"You are taking what I have said rather too literally," he chided. "The Azure Angels do not need to own the company to control it. A small number of employees loyal to them for one reason or another, as well as their own collective power, which is considerable, is quite sufficient for the task. In fact, I daresay that the Technocracy would have found and dealt with them very quickly had they been that blatant. They know fully well that Greystone's products are… contaminated… you know. They have attempted to shut it down several times in the last few years, but the Angels are counteracting their efforts, and it's not, at this point, considered a high enough priority that they are willing to put in their full strength."

There was more to it than that, I guessed. Patrick had spent a great deal of time grooming me and placing me in my current position. If Greystone suddenly went bankrupt due to some sort of technomantic meddling, I would lose much of my value as a pawn. Patrick would want to root out the 'contamination' while still keeping Greystone intact. My guess was that he was an important enough man in the Technocracy that he could influence those decisions, if not make them himself.

If my reasoning here was correct, I had been _helping_ that bastard Militts right from the start. I frowned. He damn well owed me some gratitude instead of this persecution, and I would make sure I got it. Somehow.

"As for money," Kevin said, "the Azure Angels can build fortunes for themselves very easily, should they so desire. Most mages can, you see. It's quite easy, with the right spells. But the watchful eye of the Technocracy aside, someone whose only wish in life is wealth for its own sake, well… all things being possible, let us just say that it would be most _unlikely_ for such a person to ever Awaken."

Well, that explained the luxurious apartment. I wondered what it was Kevin wanted wealth for, if it wasn't for its own sake. He certainly did seem to relish it. All this fancy furniture, expensive carpets, golden candle-holders…

Then, in a quick mirroring of that thought, I managed to answer my own question. Money might not mean anything to Kevin, but _style_ meant a great deal. For him, this gloomy urban palace represented the only acceptable kind of place to live, and as he was a mage, he had made sure he lived in it. In a way, I supposed that Diana's apartment, with its piles of gadgetry and strange tools lying everywhere, was no less an extension of her own personality than Kevin's apartment was an extension of his.

I wondered what this house looked like in Secondary. It was sure to be striking, I realised that much.

"So what's this guy's problem?" I asked. "Why does he hate me so incredibly much?"

Kevin raised an eyebrow, smiling.

"You haven't figured that out yet?"

I hesitated.

"He knows that I'm working for Patrick," I said. "Farson," I added to Kevin's questioning glance. "He thinks that I'm an agent for the Technocracy, sent to mess up his operation."

"Close," Kevin agreed, "but not quite there yet, I'm afraid. Give it some more thought, would you? Just think how more satisfying it would be for you to understand it on your own."

I considered that for a moment.

"No," I said. "I want you to tell me. What would you ask for in return?"

Kevin tilted his head, smiling enigmatically.

"What do you have, old boy?"

"You just said that mages don't need money," I said, wrinkling my brow. "But perhaps they need some help from people in high places, sometimes? I know a lot of important people who owe me favours. And others who won't mind me owing _them_ favours."

"But there's nothing of the sort that I need right now," Kevin said, still smiling.

"You may later," I pointed out.

"You would grant me a boon, then?" Kevin said. "A favour to be named later, for my estimation of Whirlwind's reasons for wanting you dead?"

He looked far too happy about that possibility for my taste, but I was in no mood to hold back now. I wanted to _know_ already, not try to piece together something from hints. I ploughed on.

"Yes!" I said. "Tell me everything you know or suspect, and I'll let you ask a favour later."

"Hold it right there," Diana's voice said.

She came walking into the ritual-room, arms crossed over her chest. She made a dark and almost menacing figure, in her black clothes and her black hair and her dark skin. The expression on her face was not quite angry, but strongly disapproving.

"You're taking advantage of my apprentice, Kevin," she said. "You should be ashamed of yourself."

"Look," I said, "I appreciate you looking out for me, but I can make my own decisions here."

"Sure, as long as they're informed decisions." She didn't take her eyes off of Kevin. "But thrust me, you do _not_ have the information to deal with this old fox and get away with it."

Kevin grinned shamelessly.

"I was merely indulging in a little trade and barter," he said. "There is no harm in that, surely?"

"Surely, my ass." Diana rolled her eyes. "For one thing, didn't I tell you to get him _informed?"_

"Excuse me," I said dryly. "I'm still in the room, you know."

"I informed him of everything that was not in fact self-evident," Kevin said. He seemed quite unaffected by Diana's scowls. He was still smiling, relaxed in every muscle. "Anything beyond that, I see no reason why he should not have to pay for."

I close my eyes, gritting my teeth. They were bloody well doing it again! I was thirty-three years old, I sat in the board of a very successful corporation, and I was every bit as Empowered as they were, but just because I couldn't conjure demons or reprogram human minds, they thought it was okay to talk over my head.

Diana snorted.

"_Right," she said dryly. "Come on, Simon. As far as I can tell, you've heard most of what you need, and the rest I can fill you in on later."_

She took my hand and gently led me into another room. Kevin followed, smiling placidly. I had to admire him, in a way. If Diana had been cross with me, I would have been sweating. Kevin, however, was clearly not the sweating type.

The room Diana took me to had what seemed to my untrained eye to be a rather extensive computer system in it. It looked a bit strange in these eighteenth-century surroundings, but Kevin had clearly spend neither money nor effort to make it fit in better. The covers of the machines were not plastic, but dark wood – or at least plastic _imitating dark wood, which amounted to the same as far as visual impressions went. Diana had clearly been meddling with it, though; an assortment of wires stuck out from the back of the computer, connecting it to a set of futuristic gadgetry that looked deeply out of place. Two mattresses were rolled out in front of it._

"You'll need to take off everything but your underwear," Diana told me and started pulling her shirt off. I raised my eyebrow while making a large point out of not making any effort to take anything off.

"Excuse me?" I said.

"Just do it. You'll understand in a moment." She threw her shirt and jeans in a pile on the floor. I thought I saw Kevin wince at that, but when I turned my head, he had resumed his relaxed smile. I noted that he wasn't making any attempt to take a look at Diana's scantily clad body. For a moment, I felt relieved; then I realised that that might as well mean that he had seen her so often that he wasn't as interested anymore. You can't win with paranoid jealousy. It'll find a way to get you no matter _what_ happens.

I sighed and kicked my shoes off, whereafter I proceeded to throw my clothes off in even more disorder than Diana had, just to bug Kevin. If I succeeded, I couldn't tell.

"Lie down," Diana instructed and pointed to a mattress.

"What _is this?" I said, without much hope of a response. But I lay down all the same._

"In a moment!" Diana repeated, and started attaching what I could only describe as electrodes to my chest, my tights and my upper arms. They were all connected to the computer, I noticed. A connection suddenly appeared to me. What was the common theme with all Diana's magick? Weird computer stuff. And add weird computer stuff to electrodes and stir, and you got…

"This is some sort of VR thing, isn't it?" I said. Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. "'He'… I mean, Karl Militts… he's in some sort of Virtual Reality world!"

"Got it in one," Diana said cheerfully and finished the ensemble by putting a pair of weird-looking goggles, like the once you wear with scuba gear, and a pair of headphones on me. I couldn't see a thing through them, but from the sounds she made, she was strapping on a set of electrodes, headphones and goggles of her own.

"Well, not just _one_…" Kevin noted cheerfully.

"But none of this makes _sense_!" I said. "How can you fight him in a…a simulation? Why not just go to where his body is?"

"That's what we're doing," Diana said, like that made perfect sense. "And as for the first part, well… that's complicated. For the moment, it's probably best if you thought of this as just a simulation, like you said."

"You mean it's _not_?" I demanded.

"Hang on to your hat," Diana said, without answering. There was a burst of static in my ears, and a body-wide sting of pain that made me gasp.

The next thing I knew, I was standing on a cloud.

Well, it certainly seemed that way, anyway. I could feel the soft, chilly texture underneath my feet, and I could see it when I looked down. It looked just like a cloud in the sky, all white and fluffy. This despite the fact that I knew for a _fact_ – okay, so maybe facts were rather more negotiable than I had thought, but _even so_ – that when you got close to a cloud, it was just a mist. And you _definitely couldn't stand on one!_

I looked up, and the sight took my breath away. The cloud I was standing on was just one of many in a vast field of them, floating over and under each other in all directions, driven by a wind I couldn't feel. A brilliant sun shone from a light-blue sky, and the very air seemed alive with radiance.

At the same time, I could feel the mattress under my back, the goggles against my face…

"This is amazing," I said matter-of-factly. "It just looks so _real…"_

I hesitated. 'Real' wasn't really the right word. A _real sky didn't look like this. But it looked like a sky would look, if the world had been a different kind of place._

I know that explanation makes no sense. It was the best I could come up with then, though, and it is the best I can come up with now.

"Thank you," Diana said from somewhere by my side. "We put in a lot of work in it."

It turned towards her, and found myself standing there, gaping. Diana had turned into some sort of angel. She still had the same face and built, but she was now wearing some sort of white robe that was held together by a silken belt at the waist. She stood in the middle of a brilliant blue light that seemed to come form her own skin, and from her shoulders, two white swan's wings grew.

She winced at my look.

"Yeah, I know, it's corny," she said. "But there are a lot of restrictions on how you can look in here. Karl decided most of the form. He's into pretty melodramatic stuff."

I remembered a certain computer conversation. I saw her point. Even so, this wasn't melodramatic. It was breathtaking.

Realising something, I took another look down at myself. I looked pretty much like I always do, but here, I was see-through. The cloud was clearly visible through my feet. I looked up at Diana with a question in my (presumably transparent) face, and she looked somewhat embarrassed.

"Again, there are only so many options here," she said apologetically. "So I'm an angel, and you're…"

"Don't tell me," I said wearily. "I'm a soul?"

"Standard visitor's icon," Diana said with a nod. "I'm a moderator, so I've got some extra options. Karl's got even more."

I looked around, thinking I might have missed Karl the last time I looked. Still, the sky was clear, and the clouds looked peaceful enough.

"This is extremely impressive," I said. "I had no idea this sort of thing was even possible. But why are we actually here?"

"To mess with Karl." Diana grinned, a rather malevolent grin for an angel. "I made some calls while you talked to Kevin. Certain extremely important data has just been deleted by our agents within Greystone. It'll take him _years to recreate it from scratch, which is why he keeps backups in here. This is the safest place imaginable, after all. Unless you're trying to hide it from someone who has a personal backdoor in here."_

"And without this information?" I said.

Diana gesture in the air, and a swarm of blue sparks rose up from the cloud we were standing on, floating around her fingers.

"Access code PurplePiper 6729," she said, slowly and firmly.

There was a pause, then a burst of some sort of horn instrument. Diana smiled and started to move the sparks around. Her fingers moved quickly and deftly. The pattern shifted again and again, making no sense to me whatsoever. How she knew what she was doing was beyond me.

"We're talking about very precise data," Diana said while she worked, "advanced algorithms, statistics, libraries… Karl can't work the changes he needs on Greystone's published material without them. He'll still control the company, but he won't be able to influence the hearts and minds of people with it anymore."

"You're destroying it? Deleting it?" I said, a bit nonplussed. My personal feelings towards Karl aside, it seemed a terrible waste. I kind of liked the idea of Greystone as a tool that could change lives and remake souls.

In fact, I had started to wonder what that kind of power could be used for in _my hands…_

"No, just downloading them into my cybernetic memory storage," she said. "I'll have to delete just about everything _else_ I've got in there, but never mind that, I've got backups. And once I've done that, I _will_ delete what Karl has stored here, and copy something else over it." She chuckled. "Then he'll have to come begging to _me_ if he wants his super-weapon back."

Meanwhile, I had discovered something in the distance. For a moment, I tried to fool myself that it was something native to this strange, make-believe world I was in. But I knew better. Diana had already hinted that Karl could choose rather… flashier… outfits than the ones we wore.

"Diana?" I said, trying to steady my voice. "I think he's coming _now. And not to beg."_

"Right on time," Diana said smugly. The sparks sank down into the cloud again, and she turned around to face what I was watching. Karl was approaching.

My appearance here – my _icon_, as Diana had called it – was that of a soul. Diana's was that of an angel.

Karl's was that of God Almighty.

I didn't have to guess where his nickname – if that was what you should call it – came from. Karl resembled a huge cyclone, tearing the clouds along its way apart as it approached us. Lightning was flashing along its sides, and from somewhere deep inside it, a brilliant, blue light was shining.

It _towered over me and Diana, filling almost our whole frontal vision. The serenity of the Azure Angel's simulation of Heaven was torn apart by the roar of its winds and the crackle of its thunder. When it spoke, though, its voice – _Karl's_ voice – outmatched them both easily._

"PURPLEPIPER," he said. "YOUR TREACHERY ENDS HERE."

"Oh, _you're one to talk," Diana snorted. Her voice was defiant, but it still sounded very weak and small next to Karl's booming announcements. "Who sent me into Secondary, if I may ask?"_

"I DID," Karl admitted without hesitation.

"And who tipped a certain furball off on where there were 'warlocks' hiding?" Diana went on. "It didn't fight its way into a fortified building just to check if someone was home. It _knew_ that we were there."

"I TOLD IT THAT YOU WERE," Karl said. "CREATURES DRIVEN BY MALEVOLENCE ALONE ARE EASY TO MANIPULATE."

"This is all being recorded, you know," Diana said. "The others will know. Will they trust you after hearing that you screwed one of your own over?"

"THEY WILL THANK ME FOR EXPOSING YOUR TREACHERY," Karl said confidently.

I tried to remind myself that this wasn't real. I was still in Kevin's apartment. I could reach out and feel the floorboards underneath my hand, though I _also felt the whipping winds caused by Karl's boisterous icon. What was more, I could feel the goggles, the headphones, the electrodes. I could tear them all out and be back in the real world. Karl could yell and scream and threaten all he wanted, but he couldn't hurt me because I wasn't really _there_…_

"You're referring to my telling a newly Empowered mage about what he was going through?" Diana said. "You _can't_ mean anything after that, because by then you had already started attacking me. And then it was necessary for me to be more open, because I needed an informed ally if I were to survive the position _you_ had put me in."

"FOOLISH CHILD." Karl's tone of condescension made me tighten my hands into fists by pure reflex. I am by no means a violent man, but I would have given _anything to get to punch this horse's ass on the nose. "SENDING YOU TO SECONDARY WAS A TEST. I HAD BEEN GIVEN CAUSE TO DOUBT YOUR LOYALTIES. IF YOU HAD BEEN TRUE TO OUR CAUSE, YOU WOULD HAVE KILLED HIM WHEN YOU HAD HIM ALONE, UNARMED AND AWAY FROM WITNESSES. HAD YOU DONE SO, I WOULD HAVE IMMEDIATELY BROUGHT YOU BACK. YOU DID NOT, AND SEALED YOUR FATE."_

"Does he _always talk like that?" I whispered to Diana._

"Ooooooh, yes…" Diana mumbled back, grimacing.

"SO I FOUND THE CREATURE THAT HAD BEEN STALKING THIS PARTICULAR REGION FOR SOME TIME," Karl went on. "I IMPLANTED IN ITS PRIMITIVE MIND THE SUGGESTION OF WHERE TO GO TO FIND PREY. YET IT FAILED IN ITS TASK, AND I WAS DISAPPOINTED."

"I feel for you," Diana said dryly. "Really. I do."

"AND NOW I FIND YOU HERE," Karl said. "DESTROYING WHAT WE HAVE WORKED SO HARD TO BUILD. YOUR FATE IS SEALED BY YOUR OWN ACTIONS. YET, I FIND MYSELF WONDERING – WHAT CAN YOU POSSIBLY HOPE TO ACCOMPLISH BY THIS? WHAT YOU HAVE DESTROYED WERE MERELY COPIES. THE REAL FILES ARE OUT OF YOUR REACH."

Diana grinned.

"You reckon?" she said innocently.

Karl paused.

"YOU'RE BLUFFING," he said, not quite sounding up to his former arrogant certainty.

"I've been known to," Diana admitted. "But not today."

"I ALONE KNOW WHO OUR AGENTS INSIDE GREYSTONE ARE," Karl growled. "I ALONE KNOWS WHICH CODES ARE NEEDED TO GIVE THEM ORDERS…"

"And you thought it'd _stay_ that way?" Diana said. She grinned smugly. "I do have _some_ skill in hacking into minds, you know. In fact, that's kind of what I'm contributing to this little enterprise, isn't it?"

"YOU… WOULDN'T… DARE…" Karl sounded like he was choking.

"I would. I have." Diana shrugged. "About fifteen minutes ago, one of your agents got a phone call. In your own voice, at that. He's deleted the works. Obedient guy. My compliments to you for hiring him. Oh, and since you took your sweet time getting here, I've deleted the backups, too."

"YOU… YOU… YOU…" Karl gave off a scream of pure rage. It made me clasp my hands over my ears, and seemed to shake the very sky. The winds of the cyclone grew stronger, and the azure light seemed to darken to a deep red. "YOU'VE _DESTROYED THE CAUSE! WHY, PURPLEPIPER? WHAT DID HE OFFER YOU TO MAKE YOU TURN YOUR BACK ON ALL YOU HAVE EVER BELIEVED IN?"_

Diana smiled faintly.

"You're just _so_ damn sure of yourself, aren't you?" she said. "Did it for one second cross your mind to listen to _my side of the story? Did you ever think that maybe I had reasons for what I did?"_

Karl didn't answer. The sky above began to grow sunset red, and the clouds started turning into black, ominous thunderclouds.

"We were _wrong," Diana said. "We thought Simon was Patrick Farson come to spy on us. He's not. I've seen the two of them together."_

"THERE IS ANOTHER POSSIBILITY," Karl said, somewhat sullenly.

"Yeah. And that's one's true. Sort of. But Simon doesn't know anything of who Farson is that I haven't told him myself. I took the opportunity to scan his mind for information a few days ago. If he really was Farson, he could have shielded himself. Being… that other thing… he couldn't have. Not against me."

I gave her a we're-going-to-talk-about-that-later look. So she had done a bit _more than just make me relax that time, had she? I supposed it was understandable, but it made me feel uncomfortable. My mind wasn't some drawer that you could just rummage around in, after all! Diana smiled sheepishly at me before turning back to Karl._

"He can make a great ally to us!" she insisted. "He wants to fight Farson. Imagine the possibilities if we could turn Farson's own…" She took a deep breath. "Farson's own _clone_ against him!"

That was the point where my mind stopped functioning for a long while.

Clone?

Clone?

_Clone_?

But, God help me, it made sense when nothing else did. I should have known, I suppose. There had been all this weird science stuff; if the Technocracy could implant compulsions in my head, why shouldn't it be able to perform human cloning? _Mundane science was getting pretty damn close to that._

Patrick saw himself as better than everyone else, didn't he? So if he wanted a competent pawn at the head of a major company, who would be better than someone who was made of the same superior stuff that he was?

And so he had watched over me all my life. Guided me. Turned me into as much of a perfect carbon copy of himself that he could, all the while able to give me orders that I had to follow. God, it must be almost like being able to be in several places at once!

Patrick wasn't my father after all. He was _me_. Sure, he had lived a different life, but essentially, he was me and I was him. How could I fight him? How do you fight… _yourself_?

I felt like I was going to fall off the cloud and plumage helplessly through this infinite sky forever. Was I real? Was I a person? Or was I just some sort of an appendix with delusions of grandeur, a by-product of Patrick, grown from his nail clippings or something, a soulless monstrosity, a freak who thought he was human…

"… TAINTED BY YOUR FEELINGS," Karl's voice droned on, somewhere very far away. "YOU HAVE LAIN WITH HIM. I CAN SENSE IT IN YOUR MIND."

"I don't trust him because I've slept with him," Diana said, sounding like she was struggling to contain her anger. "I slept with him because I trust him."

"YOU ARE A FOOL, PURPLEPIPER," Karl said.

"So you've told me already," Diana said sweetly. "Now, _you're a useless, pompous bag of wind, but you don't hear me nagging you about _that_, do you?"_

"YOU DIE NOW," Karl stated. "YOU AND HIM BOTH."

Somewhere in my shock, a thought found its way to my attention. That thought was that while I was not _strictly_ speaking here – for that matter, strictly speaking _here_ didn't even exist – that only mattered in a world where there was such a thing as objective truths. In a _subjective _manner, I was seeing Karl's Whirlwind-icon in front of me, I was feeling the cloud underneath my feet, and I was hearing the booming thunder around me. It _felt like I was there._

So at least on some level, I _believed_ I was there.

And belief shaped the world.

It was very possible that I could, therefore, die a very real death in this make-believe place. And Karl, who seemed to know his way around here, appeared to think so, which counted for a great deal, proof-wise.

Maybe I was just an appendix, but I was an appendix that wanted to _live!_

"Ah ah ah!" Diana said quickly and raised her hand. "Fry my brain, and you'll never get that data back."

Karl hesitated.

"YOU… DOWNLOADED THEM?" he said, suddenly understanding. "INTO YOUR OWN HARDWARE? I _SEE…"_

"Yep," Diana said, grinning. "But I'm not going to stand around here while you try to hack into my mind. If you want it, come and get it! _Log Out!"_

Again, there was the blast of static, the burst of pain…

… and I was lying on a mattress on Kevin's floor, covered in electrodes. I tore off the goggles and headphones in time to see Diana free herself from both them and the electrodes with an ease that hinted of experience. I struggled with my own while she got up and picked up her switchblade from inside her shirt, which was still lying on the floor. She stared, grave-faced, at something beyond my field of vision. I followed her line of sight, and saw what had her worried.

The screen on Kevin's computer had turned into a kaleidoscope image of colours and shapes, swirling quickly enough to become a blur. Electricity was crackling down the length of the machine, and smoke was coming from somewhere.

I had seen this display once before. Just before something had come out of the computer.

I had a feeling that I knew what was going to come out of it this time.

"Stop him!" I gasped. "Block him! Something!"

"No!" Diana said. "I want him to come! He's too strong to face in the Web, but in the material world, we have a shot!"

I wasn't so sure about that. Karl had struck me as a bit of an idiot, but he had _also struck me as someone who was arrogant for a _reason_, namely that he had never found a reason to be humble. That world or this, I didn't want to face him, not even with Kevin and Diana on my side._

Speaking of Kevin, he was standing in the doorway, leaning casually on an elegant cane and smiling in a way that suggested that this was just a bit of faintly amusing entertainment for him. Bastard.

Diana opened the switchblade. _Click_. Her eyes were cold and her expression focused. I struggled to my feet to stand beside her. I had no idea what I might be able to do, but at the very least I had the bulk to be a disturbance. Besides, I wasn't just going to do _nothing while my fate was determined._

A bolt of electricity shot out of the monitor, turned towards and struck into the floor. As I watched, the curve of energy connecting monitor and floor thickened.

And took on form.

And then, with a final hiss and a rain of sparks from the computer, Karl Militts materialised in front of me. The _real_ Karl Militts, not some assumed virtual exterior meant to impress others and stroke his ego.

He was tall, though not as tall as me, and thin, bordering on gaunt. He wore faded jeans and an open black leather jacket. His face was young, pale and smiling insolently. His hair was coloured purple and cut into a rooster's comb. From his belt, an egg-formed, plastic object hung, and a wire connected it to a keyboard he was supporting with his left hand.

And yes, there was _that_ look in his eyes. _I-want_. _I-can. __You-can't-stop-me._

Still, out of his element like this, despite the fact that his arrogance was unruffled, I couldn't help feeling that he was a little more… manageable. Oh, I had no doubt that he was more powerful than I could ever imagine. I didn't hold it for the least bit unlikely that he would, within a few moments, break Diana and Kevin to pieces and come after me, still grinning that superior grin as he killed me. But after seeing Patrick Farson in a rage, _any other mage was bound to be somewhat less than impressive._

"Kevin Harsh," Karl said. "I should have known that you would be willing to flaunt my authority. You have made a serious error."

"Oh, dear heavens, have I?" Kevin said. As annoyances went, his smile was right up there with Karl's. "And here I thought that I was making certain that I would _finally get an opportunity to show you what some _real_ magick can do."_

"And you call your wand-waving folly _magick_?" Karl said. "It's nothing more than superstition, a disgrace against the dignity of the human mind, allowed to linger only due to a regrettable laxness in the Consensus…"

"Oh my, the youngling speaks of the Consensus," Kevin said. "And what, pray tell, would _you know about the Consensus? When did you ever study the ancient volumes that describe its workings in detail, as I have? What do you Virtual Adepts do but meddle, meddle, meddle, without a __thought of the cosmic balance you are interrupting?"_

Diana leaned over to whisper in my ear.

"Remind me to kick him for that remark," she mumbled.

"You are equating age with wisdom," Karl snorted. "Your vaunted Order is like a senile old man telling the young and clever what to do."

"What we are is the wielders of _true_ magick and _true_ wisdom," Kevin said with dignity. "And _true _power, rather than your technical toys. Ours is the thunder. Ours is the word. Ours is the glory."

"Yours is nothing but dust and empty pride," Karl said.

Diana sighed.

"Annoying, isn't it?" she said. "They've been known to keep this up for _days… Hey, you two!" She glared at Kevin and Karl in turn. "Can we just fight? __Please?"_

"If you insist, PurplePiper," Karl said. Then he smirked. "Oh, wait – it's 'Diana' here in the land of meat, isn't it? I will never know how you stand this primitive world. Let me just invite a few friends in…"

He pressed a few buttons on his keyboard. Nothing happened, and he scowled.

"No, no, none of that," Kevin said. "No summoning spirits in my house. They always leave a mess."

"Round one to us," Diana said. Then she jumped forward, switchblade slashing.

Karl slipped aside like a ghost, his fingers dancing on the keyboard. Diana missed him, her slashing motion made her bump her hand into the desk and drop the knife, and she stumbled over a mattress and fell gracelessly to the floor.

"Round two to me," Karl smirked. "I'm more than capable of dealing with you all at once without aid, after all. Especially since my diagnostics show that the data you've stolen takes your whole memory in possession. You have deleted all your bio-enhancement programs, all your targeting programs and all your process override programs." He shook his head. "You are only human at the moment. I, on the other hand, am so much more."

I threw myself at Karl. I wasn't quite sure what that might accomplish, but I couldn't think of anything else to do.

For a moment, it looked like it was going to work. He hadn't expected me to act; his attention had been split between Diana and Kevin. My clumsy punch hit him in the chest, and he staggered backwards, gasping for breath. But at the same time, his fingers were typing on the keyboard.

A sudden, splitting headache made me sink to my knees, literally whimpering with pain. I couldn't even see; stars kept exploding before my eyes.

"You _suffer, you fucking __freak!" Karl growled, his pompous tone temporarily swept away by anger. "Don't you dare fucking __touch me!" Then they came back, and somehow, I had a feeling that his superior smile did, too. "And what do you presume that _you_ are doing, Diana?"_

There was a gasp, and I heard Diana drop to the floor. I struggled to reach through the agonising pain in my head – it felt like my skull had suddenly become too small for my brain – and find out what was going on, but I couldn't.

"And now, for the master of the house," Karl said. "Go ahead. Show me what your ancient sorcery can do, and then I will show you some _real magick."_

"If you insist." Kevin sounded amused. "_Semia geress elliadon!"_

There was a scream, I think, and a lot of electronical whining, and something even greater, beneath all that, that might have been the sound of magick itself… but I wasn't too good at observing at the moment, as my headache had suddenly tripled.

And then it was gone. For a moment, all I could do was draw in a deep breath and enjoy the novelty of not being in agony. Then I slowly got to my feet and looked around.

Diana was getting up from the floor herself, looking tired, but pleased. Kevin was standing just like he had been all along, leaning against his staff, looking civilised and in control. Karl was tapping frantically on his keyboard, a look of panicked disbelief on his face.

"_Respond!" he shouted. "You must respond! This is… This is not acceptable…!" He turned his wild gaze to Kevin. "What did you _do_?"_

"Well, I did tell you," Kevin said, sounding faintly bored. "Ours is the thunder. Or, as you heathen technomancers would say, ours is the _electricity. And right now, your little toy there has none. Which pulls your teeth out rather nicely, wouldn't you say?" He smiled. "This is why it's a _bad_ idea to entrust the holy work of magick to fickle technology. I tell people so all the time, but will they listen?"_

"You… you…" Karl growled, his face red with fury. I wondered when he had last been humiliated in this manner. I wondered if he had _ever been humiliated in this manner._

I was fairly sure that it would be good for him. Suffering built character, after all, and the good Whirlwind could use some.

"And once again," Kevin said, "the wielders of _true_ magick stand victorious, while the half-trained meddlers fall short."

Diana didn't need me to remind her. She walked over to Kevin and kicked him.

It was a little later. Diana and I were fully dressed again, and sitting at Kevin's dining-room table and enjoying a cup of tea. Karl was tied to a chair in a windowless room in the far end of the apartment. Kevin said that he would consider what he would do to him. Killing him was far too _uncivilised_, apparently, but letting him go would be awfully unhealthy. Kevin would come up with something, he said. It was always nice to have an ace up one's sleeve in these troubled times.

I was fully aware that I was being made accessory to kidnapping here, and I really didn't care. Either my morals were down or my ability to free-thinking was up. I would reason out the difference tomorrow, I promised myself. Before then, I just didn't have the strength to make the effort.

"So what happens now?" I said.

"I leave." Diana sighed and looked down in her tea. "I don't want to, but Farson will be up in arms against me for a while now. I need to hide."

I nodded gloomily. And cursed myself for not acting on my inclinations when I first got to know Diana. We could have been lovers for the last six months, instead of just getting one night and then having to cut the whole thing short due to intervention by angry Technocrat.

"Will you be all right?" I said.

"Oh, I'm good at hiding." She smiled faintly. "I've done it pretty often. The law doesn't like me. For some reason."

"I'll miss you," I said.

She looked up at me, blinking. Then she smiled.

"Oh, you won't have to. You saw the Azure Angels' node, briefly. There are more like it, lots more. I'll put you in touch with someone who sells gear for logging onto the Web. You'll get the hang of it soon enough. I said I'd take you on as my apprentice, and I damn well meant it. We'll just have to move our studies somewhere where I won't suffer that high a risk of getting killed."

I met her smile with a rather shaky one of my own. The idea of seeing her again soon, even if only in that strange way, did make me feel a little better. But then I grew sombre again. That hadn't been the greatest of my woes, anyway. Just the one that I knew how to think about.

"Am I really a clone?" I said.

Diana shrugged uncomfortably.

"I think so. I mean, nothing's ever certain, but… it fits the picture. The Technocracy is good at cloning people, and Farson is just the kind of egocentric maniac who would want more hims running around."

"God." I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead. "How am I supposed to even _begin to deal with that? My parents aren't my parents. I guess my real parents are __Patrick's parents, whoever they were. I'm not even real. I'm just his shadow. I'm not _human_."_

Diana pushed her cup aside, leaned over the table, grabbed hold of the sides of my head and kissed me resolutely. She kept at it for a long time, at the end of which my head was spinning, my cheeks were blushing and I felt like I was about to suffocate in the nicest possible way.

"Yeah, you see that I'm completely repulsed by you, don't you?" she said wryly as she leaned back in her chair. "Look, you'll come to terms with it if you just get a bit of time to adjust. So you're a clone? Well, I'm a cyborg. And Kevin wants to be a god, and Karl spends most of his time as a computer program. You're not really running with a normal crowd anymore, so it's okay to not be normal yourself."

"I guess," I said. I had to smile, despite myself. Diana had a way of making problems seem largely irrelevant.

"That's a good boy," Diana said and leaned over to kiss me again.

"Uhm." I figured it was now or never. If I wanted _this_ particular piece of information, I had to ask her. "Should you really be doing this?"

She pouted prettily.

"Well, I didn't hear you complaining last night…" she said.

"No, but, er…" I tried to pull myself together. I had just been saved from a virtual god by a modern wizard. Compared to that, what was a little relationship anxiety between friends? "What about Kevin?"

She looked perplexed.

"What _about Kevin?"_

"Well, I mean, aren't you two… that is…" I was fumbling now. I could not remember when I had last felt this uncomfortable. This was another price of being Empowered, I guessed. You actually _cared_ about things. You couldn't go around being all clinical in your views of relationships, like I had for most of my life. "… a couple?" I finished eventually.

"Uhm… no." Diana had a strange look on her face. "Not… _really_, no…"

"Oh." I felt that I was blushing rather deeply now. "Okay. It was just that you seemed so close. I mean, I know that men and women _can_ be just friends, but I always though that if they were really _good friends, some attraction was inevitable."_

"Maybe." Diana's voice was choked, and her shoulders were shaking in a tell-tale way. I resisted an urge to squirm. "But that sort of assumes… _hrrrmmmff! That sort of assumes that the man in question is…" She took a brief pause to steady herself, her grin threatening to split her face in two. "… is interested in women as such."_

"What do you mean, 'interested in woman as…'" Then I got it. It was really quite surprising that I hadn't gotten it before. A stray phrase that Kevin had used drifted back into my mind. _I lost a man who was… quite precious to me_. "Oh," I said dumbly.

That was too much for Diana. She broke into helpless laughter.

I groaned and hid my face against the table. I should have known. I _would have known, had I not been so determined to feel jealous. I felt very much like the dumbest and most neurotic person on the face of the earth._

I supposed that I had to apologise to Kevin. I had been going around hating him for absolutely no reason at all.

Well, aside from him being a horrible, arrogant snob, that was. But the whole he-saved-my-life thing probably cancelled that out somewhat…

"Okay, okay," I groaned. "I admit it. I am an idiot. And I'm also a _jealous idiot. Will someone please shoot me now?"_

Diana grinned at me.

"I'm sure that would count as a waste of natural resources."

"So you've told me," I said, remembering that morning, what felt like a lifetime ago. Could I really have had my whole world so completely turned up-side-down in only a few days. Could I _really?_

"And so I'll _keep_ telling you," Diana said. "Until you realise that you've got no need to be jealous. Come on, Simon. I've had a crush on you since day one. That was back when I thought you were Farson, if you recall. It takes a lot for me to fall for someone I'm prepared to hate."

After that, I still felt embarrassed, but I also felt warm for other reasons.

"Be that as it may," Diana said, looking somewhat embarrassed by the uncharacteristic expression of genuine feeling, "this is how we're going to do this. I'm going to use my little brainwashing program and imprint some false memories in your head. They'll be very persuasive, I promise. When Farson questions you, you'll tell him what you _think_ is the truth, which will be that I had you under some sort of mental control and yadi yadi yadda, and you don't know anything about anything, just the way he wants it. Then, in a few weeks' time, it'll wear off." She smiled. "And then, we'll meet again."

"I'll be looking forward to it," I said sincerely.

A clone in love. Good heavens.

I always knew Diana was good at her job. It's just that for most of the time I've known her, I didn't know what her job _really_ was. She imprinted those memories all right, and when Farson found me – far away from Kevin's apartment – they dictated the story I told him. He seemed satisfied by that, and things went back just about to normal. Except with a new secretary. Who calls me 'Mr. Stromberg', no matter how many times I tell her not to. I don't let it bother me that much anymore, though.

The memories did eventually wear off. That was a fairly harrowing experience, but not a very interesting one to tell; it mostly consisted of me agonising over whether I was going insane. Once I became fairly certain that the resurfacing memories were the real ones, I started writing this little manuscript, as a way of getting it all clear in my head. I may have mixed up a thing or two, but near as I can tell, this is what happened.

So this is the story of my Empowering. I'm not sure if you can learn anything from it. Everything I've ever believed in has been wrong. I see no reason for why the things I believe in now should be assumed to be correct. Most of them are likely to be more of Diana's 'oversimplifications', anyway. And even she admitted that the _real_ truth lies somewhere between the Technocracy's mechanical universe and the Traditions' will-driven one.

For now, though, what I've learned will have to suffice. I am not a wise man, after all. I am a foolish man, or at least a man who has been acting like a fool for most of his thirty-three years. And what I have learned and what I believe is this:

There is magick. It is weakened, maybe dying, but it exists.

There is a Consensus. It defines and enslaves us, turns us into animals when we should be gods.

There is a Technocracy. It rules the world. It hates magick, hates freedom, hates everything that might threaten its perfect order.

There is a reign of conformity on the earth. I will fight it if I can.

And, for better or worse; there is a new mage in the world.


End file.
